by Ed Lathrop

No one is happy when a computer fails to work properly in any way.  The problem that annoys my customers more than any other is when their computers slow down.  Computer slowdowns happen all the time.  So do errors and crashes.  Are you having any of these problems?  Let’s find out what’s wrong.

Our first area of concern is parasites.  Spyware, and to lesser extent adware, can not only cause your computer to
misbehave, but they can follow you as you surf the Internet and copy your banking information.  Viruses, which are an entirely different thing than spyware can harm your operating system so badly, you will need to do a reformat to use your computer again.

photo credit: ♥ H.G♥

Get Rid of Viruses First

First, Clean Out the Viruses First of all, lets see if there are any viruses present on your hard drive.  Run your virus
 scanner.  If it happens you don’t have one or you think yours might be sleeping on the job, search one of the search engines for a free virus scan.  You will find plenty of offers.  Run one of these and see what, if anything turns up.  If anything does turn up, and you took the free scan deal, you will have to pay to make the virus scanner yours so you can remove the virus or viruses.

At this point you know you are virus free because you either removed all the viruses the scanner found or you didn’t have any in the first place.  Now ,lets go after spyware.  If you have a spyware scanner, run it now.  If not, do a search for free antispyware scan or something similar.  You will find there are no shortages of options available.

Making Sure We Clear All Problems

It is nice to be able to get a free spyware scan, but don’t confuse this with a free spyware cleaner.  Free spyware cleaners can cause more problems than they correct.  A good free scanner requires a payment to activate its cleaning function.  So, if your free scan uncovers spyware or adware, you need to essentially buy the spyware cleaner.  This, in my opinion is dirt cheap compared to the financial horrors spyware could cause a person.

Now that we know we are free of spyware and viruses, lets look for registry corruption.  If you a have a registry cleaner use it. If you dont, do an online search for one.  Dont search for a free registry cleaner, you dont want one of those.  Search for a free registry scan.  A good registry cleaner will give your registry a free scan so you will know if you have registry corruption, but it wont repair the corruption without you purchasing the product.  Since registry corruption causes more computer slowdowns than anything else I know of, this purchase is a necessary one.

A Corrupt Registry Means a Poor Running Computer

Registry corruption can get in the way of an operating system so much it can make the OS incapable of loading into the hard drive at startup.  This means it is just about impossible to keep a computer running at full tilt without having a registry cleaner installed on a computer these days.  While this may not have been the case a few years ago, it is today because Windows XP and Vista are so much more easily corrupted.

If you followed along with the procedure in this article, your computer should be back up to speed and running well again.  However, even if no improvement is apparent in your computer, you took care of some things that were working against it.

A computer that still isn’t up to par at this point needs attention at a repair shop.  Or maybe there is one more thing you could do.  Open up your task manager and look for a program that is using your entire computers strength.  If you find such a program, close it.  If it is ever necessary to use it you can open it when you need to.

You have read how to get your computer running fast again. Now, find out about registry cleaners which optimize as well for more speed and better performance at Registry Optimize. Then see how the top spyware cleaners rate against one another and learn about one top antispyware program that is also the top rated virus cleaner, at Antispyware Review.

photo credit: xcaballe