Its a bummer when your laptop is running sluggishly and applications take forever to load. It could be that your laptop is old, or maybe the system is just being bogged down. Luckily, there are several ways to help get your laptop back up to speed  Here are a few tips from our friends at Computerease St. Louis to help you speed up your laptop.

1. Add more RAM – Adding more RAM is usually the first-choice option for speeding up a computer. More RAM allows you to run more programs at once without your laptop running sluggishly or locking up. Its probably best to have at least 1GB of RAM; 2GB is becoming more of a standard (especially for Vista). Adding RAM may not decrease your boot time, but usually will launch programs faster and allow you to run more programs simultaneously without problems.

2. Disk Defragmenting – Defragging your laptop every so often (depending on how often you use your laptop) is a good idea. Defragging your drive helps increase system performance because it organizes fragmented files that are dispersed across the drive. So instead of the hard drive’s head searching around for files, it will know where to find them. This will decrease boot time and help launch programs faster. Defragging your laptop is easy:
Click Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter.
Just let your notebook sit for awhile until its done.

3. Lose the Start Up Programs – When you boot your laptop, you probably have a lot of other programs launching automatically. Things that laptop manufacturers, or even you, have loaded onto your notebook. These programs slow down your laptop considerably because having several applications running simultaneously before you even start computing eats up RAM and consumes more of your CPU power. This is an easy fix, just run msconfig from the Start menu. From there you select the programs that you do or do not want launching when you boot you laptop.

For more information for speeding up your laptop, see our Tips for Improving Laptop Performance

Sometimes other issues will still continue to bog down your system, things such as viruses or spyware. A company called Computer Service Now can help with Virus and Spyware Removal. For basic laptop or desktop computer support and complete repair services, look for services such as the ones from tvit.net/computer-repair-support/.

If your laptop is undergoing maintenance or you need a temporary laptop solution, RentOurLaptops offers Online Laptop Rentals.