Is your computer as fast as the first day, when you purchased it or the speed has dropped without any reason? Are you receiving messages about low memory? Are you tired of your computer being so slow and trying to find a way to speed it up.
PC speed can be affected by many things, but one of the largest factors is deficiency of computer storage space. While your PC may have had lots of memory when you purchased it, that capacity begins going down simply through regular use. Most of the time this creeps up slowly, and it can be difficult to find out where all that memory went.
There is a free program called TreeSize and it checks the memory usage on your PC. It scans your PC and gives you a list of how much memory each program or file is taking up. This program allows you to easily locate memory "hogs" and retrieve some of that precious space. The program is freeware designed to work on Windows 2000/Vista/XP. An earlier version works on systems using Windows 9x/ME. The program requires 2.1 Megabyte of free space to install.
Once you download and install this program, an icon shows up on your desktop. The program launches from the desktop shortcut and opens a blank window with two menu Bars at the top. Selecting the "Scan" button drops down a list of available drives on your system. Once you select a drive, the scan begins. The folder icon will open a browser panel from which a specific folder can be chosen. Clicking "OK" starts the scan process.
As the memory scan is in progress, mousing over any displayed sub folder will pop up an information panel showing details of that item. When scanning is complete, folders can be expanded as needed to show exactly how much memory each area is using. By default, memory is shown in megabytes. Buttons along the top menu bar allow viewing options of KB (kilobytes), MB (megabytes), GB (gigabytes), or automatic selection of units based on file size.
Other display modes let you see memory usage as a percentage of drive or folder size or by file count. Results are ordered numerically by default, but can be sorted alphabetically if you prefer clicking the appropriate menu button.
For examining the results, look for large blocks of memory being used by programs or files that don't add up. You can then mouse over any files that you can not recognize, and search for clues in the details. Enlarge the folders as far as they go looking for documents that may point to the parent program. To see the documents more easily clicking the open-folder icon and it will open the file in Windows Explorer.
Go to "Add/Remove Programs" in the control panel and uninstall the old files that are no longer in use and have piled up. Temp files can often be deleted safely to free up more memory. If you do decide to remove or delete anything, be sure to make a backup copy or wait a few weeks to empty the recycle bin so that if a problem comes up and you need to restore that file you still have a copy of it.
You can transfer the seldom-used files and programs to other drives or archived on external storage. Most users save their music and pictures in the "My Documents" folder. Actually it gets saved by default and it tends to take up lots of memory. Some of those records that you rarely open can be moved and it will give you big chunk of space.
You might have created some daily back up folders or logs but have not deleted the previous edition. After some time all these logs swell up and take up the memory space. Always check before deleting or removing something.
Once you have completed cleaning up or deleting any unused files and moving some of the programs, run another scan to see how much memory space you have gained. You can also print the reports. Scanning on a regular basis will make future problems stand out easily, and they can be handled before performance suffers.
Jacqueline Gharibian is the author of this article. She is hoping that this can resolve some of the problems that many have with their computers. If you have to work constantly with your computer but your PC is very slow, or you are in the middle of some important project and your computer crashes, it can get very frustrating. To read more you can visit her site Registry Error Cleaner.
Jacqueline Gharibian is the author of this article. She is hoping that this can resolve some of the problems that many have with their computers. If you have to work constantly with your computer but your PC is very slow, or you are in the middle of some important project and your computer crashes, it can get very frustrating. To read more you can visit her site Registry Error Cleaner.
