How many times have you found yourself complaining about how slow your computer is and how you wish that there was something you could do about it. Well, the good news is that there is something you can do to fix your slow computer. By performing a few simple PC maintenance tasks you can easily fix slow computer problems and speed up your computer. Let us have a look at some of the most essential ones.

• One of the most essential tasks to prevent computer errors is to update your operating system, software and device drivers. These updates are released on a regular basis by the manufacturer of each product. There are two main goals of these updates—to patch up any detected security vulnerabilities because they can be exploited by malware programs built around them and to include any new features in the existing product. There are many software products that have a built in update feature. So, you can enable this feature to ensure that your software is always up to date. For example, to automatically install updates related to Microsoft products, you may enable the Windows Automatic Update feature. If an automatic update feature is not available, you may need to perform the update task manually on a regular basis.

• Next and an equally important activity is to have tools that can prevent and also remove malware infections from your computer. For example, you need an antivirus utility to prevent and remove viruses, Trojans, worms and so on. In the same way, you need antispyware to get rid of malicious spyware and adware programs. As a vigilant user, you must keep these tools updated with the latest definitions and enable their real-time protection feature to ensure that you are protected from these malicious programs at all times.

• As your PC gets older, your hard disk tends to get filled up with programs and data you do not need. It also gets fragmented when a single data is broken into multiple pieces and stored all over the hard disk, wherever space is available. To fix hard disk problems, first use the Add or Remove Programs or a third-party program uninstaller utility to remove all programs you don’t use. Next, clean up unwanted files with the help of the Disk Clean up tool. Finally, use the Disk Defragmenter tool to analyze and defrag your broken data.

• Next is the registry. It is important to regularly scan and clean your registry to prevent many different types of registry errors. These errors usually occur when your registry gets filled up with unwanted and corrupt entries. To fix registry error(s) that may occur, due to a bloated and damaged registry, you will have to perform a thorough registry scan to identify unwanted and corrupt data and then, repair it. To do this, you may seek the help of a registry cleaner tool. A registry cleaner is designed to automatically scan, clean and repair the Windows registry. You can also use an advanced registry tool to defrag your registry. Defragging helps in compressing and reindexing the registry files. This is the reason why defragging not only helps reduce the size of your registry, but also helps in speeding it up.