Is your computer running slow and you want to speed up computer performance but dont want to upgrade your hardware. This article will provide you with some simple and easy tips with detailed guidelines and screeshots to instantly speed up your computers performance.

First let’s understand what affects Computer performance (i.e What is computer speed?) then we can understand how to speed up computer? Well the 2 key factors for your computer speed are processor (CPU) utilization and RAM utilization. CPU utilization is the % of processor that is being used by your Computer when it’s running (Max 100%).

RAM utilization is the % of RAM that is being used by the Computer when it’s running (Max 100%).

On a fast computer the CPU utilization will not be more than 10% after the computer has been powered up and has just completely booted up with windows and the RAM utilization would not be more than 40% of the total RAM available on the Computer.

On a slow computer the CPU utilization windows would take really very long to load up, and even after windows has loaded up the % CPU utilization would be 30% or more and would take really long to settle down to less than 10% or may be never and the RAM utilization may be between 50 - 90%.

So you see as the CPU and RAM utilization goes up your computer will become slower. Want to see the performance of your Computer, press the “CTRL + Shift + Esc” keys together, this will bring up the “Windows task manager”, alternatively you can press “CTRL + Alt + Del” together and select the Start Task Manager option which will also do the same.
Once in the Windows task manager you will be on the applications tab where you can see all the applications that are running on your computer.

Note: Please note the pictures presented on this page are from Windows Vista, if you had like me to a page Windows XP, then please leave a comment at the end of the page and I will make an honest attempt to make the same available.

Now select the Performance tab as show in the picture below, now you see, it shows the CPU usage and the Memory usage. The CPU usage shows the % of CPU that’s being utilized and the memory shows the total amount of memory (RAM) that is being used in MB, below that in the box physical memory, Total is the amount of RAM that’s available on your Computer. Divide the memory usage by the total to arrive at the % RAM utilization for your computer.

On Windows Vista you also have the resource monitor that provides utilization details for the CPU, Disk, RAM and Network  but for this discussion knowing the CPU and RAM utilization as mentioned above is good enough.

You could do the following to optimize the CPU and RAM utilization to speed up your Computer: