Speeding up old computer

A friend of mine has an old computer that is running slow. I said i would take a look and it and try and speed it up a bit. Don't think he has ever maintained at all. What are the best things to do to get it running better? I was thinking the following:

CCleaner
Auslogics disk defrag
IOBIT uninstaller to remove unwanted programs
remove startup items - jetboost

Are these suitable? Anything else i should use? Is jetboost good enough to use to remove startup items. Or should i just use an all in one package such as Advanced System Care Free

 

Hi my friend , Merry Christmas , welcome to MG's :major

You can inform us about the specifications of your computer , you must download this

http://majorgeeks.com/download4181.html

Go to

from the left side you must opt for menu
Summary ( wait 30 seconds until report is generated )
you have to select Report from bar menu
from sub menu Quick Report - Plain Text - opting for Desktop as saving location

follow this

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=86880 :wave

 

Thanks for that. It's very helpful. Is it better to do each step with the recommended individual programs? Or should I just download advanced system care. It will only be the free edition though.

 

Depends on how old the machine is, how much RAM, what the spec's of the hard drive is, what CPU the computer has.

 

not sure how old the computer is. It's just a bog standard home computer. Windows XP i think. Maybe 1 or 2gb RAM. Nothing powerful. What difference does it make

 

Yes that is like stating that your car is Red, and the sky is blue. There is no such thing as a standard home computer. All of the info I asked for can be obtained through a resource like Belarc Advisor at belarc.com, or by clicking on Run and type in 'msinfo32' without the quotes, post the results from System Summary tab.

 

Please follow my post :confused

If you have a lot of programmes in your machine then more Ram is better because programmes is consuming a lot of resources of the system during the process/run , you have a look at this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random-access_memory :wave

 

You have not mentioned a budget for improvement. Is he willing to spend a little to upgrade and if so, how much?

 

Speccy Will give you all most all the info about the computer you are working on.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Speccy_d6358.html

When you install you can start the program let it run for about a min to gather the info and then when it is done loading the info go to the File option in the top left corner and save every thing as text file and then you can edit the text file then out it up here so we can have a look see.

In the text file remove stuff like Ip adress and the windows Serial Number.Every thing eles is fine.

It can give us the main boards Manufacturer and model numbers.