Last Updated on April 20, 2020

I’ve only had experience with Windows operated computers, so this is what I’m referring to in here. Computer repair specialists were always hard to find, and many times we had to try to figure out a solution to fix a computer which stopped working, because no specialist would come home, and to take a PC to the service company was extremely troublesome, mainly because such computer repair centers were in the center of the city, where we barely had any parking spots. So, you had to carry that heavy computer for more than 1 km, to get it fixed. You can imagine that we tried to exchange information between us, to discover tips which worked, in order to fix the bloody PC without all that hassle. If I tell you that Internet wasn’t invented yet, then you can see that information was very hard to get.

If you don’t know, Windows operated computers tend to get sluggish after a time, especially if you repeatedly install and uninstall various applications. These are a few tips which everybody told me should help me make my computer faster, which I didn’t notice to help me very much.

Computer Repair Tip 1: Defragment Often

The information on the hard disk is written in chunks called sectors. One application can spread across many such sectors, and if they are not next to each other, the head which reads the information on the hard disk has to make additional movements, thus increasing the reaction time of the computer, resulting in sluggish, slow launch of the respective application.

While I believe the reasoning behind this, from experience I can tell you that defragmentation had no effect on my computer’s speed, at least not an effect that a human can notice. Milliseconds that I might have gained by performing the defrag operation every week were not worth the actual time spent on doing the defragmentation itself.

Computer Repair Tip 2: Clean Up Disk Errors

This is easy to do: on My Computer, select the drive you wish to clean up errors on, right-click on it, then select Properties. The first option from the second tab of the menu that opens is Check Disk. It won’t run, but you can schedule it to start next time when you’ll reboot your computer.

Computer Repair Tip 3: Remove Temporary Files

This is called the Disk Cleanup and you can find it in the same menu as in Computer Repair Tip no 2. It will free up some space on your hard drive, which is good, but the speed gain won’t be noticeable for human senses.

The only computer repair tip that worked perfectly each time, and offered me a fast system, at least for a couple of months was to reinstall Windows. I’m seriously considering switching to Mac at the next computer upgrade I’m going to get.

Do you have any more computer repair tips that never helped you improve your computer’s performance?