It often happens that a computer with good configuration eventually starts running slow. That kind of situation happens a lot in my experience. But what could you do for speeding up your machine?

There are few things you could do, but my suggestion is that you should first try to speed up your hard drive by doing some or all of the following:

– defragment you hard drives (since Windows Vista defragmentation is ran as a scheduled task);
– clean all temporary files, including your browser temporary files;
– run a disk check (chkdsk driveletter: /r /f ).

This usually does the trick and it effects the speed of your computer in a positive way. But if it still runs slow, you should check if your computer is not overheating. To resolve laptop overheating you can try cleaning the heat sinks of your laptop. It is pretty much the same with desktop computers, but it is usually a lot easier.

The next step is to check whether there are many programs running in silent mode, i.e. programs that are started automatically when Windows starts up. You can find these programs by typing msconfig in the run field and clicking on the startup tab. You could also find a list of this programs in the registry of your windows under: \HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run; or \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run;

If any of these tricks does not work for you, it is probably best to consult with your hardware vendor to see if your computer has any hardware problems or it just needs an hardware/software upgrade.