Mistake #1: Assuming system repair involves reinstalling or upgrading the operating system Your PC is crashing or slowing down or downright…glitchy, and you’ve just hurled a few choice words to the heavens about Microsoft Windows, but is it really your OS’s fault? Many computer experts know that even an operating system in perfect shape could not prevent many of the root causes of computer slowdown. In fact, it isn’t even aware of most of the core issues behind PC slowdown, system crashes and frustrating freezes. Your best first step? Knowing exactly what’s wrong and avoiding trial and error remedies. Find a free system health scan that can pinpoint the real bottlenecks affecting your PC. This one is excellent.

Mistake #2: Doing scheduled or manual maintenance to prevent the need for system repair Believe it or not, your computer is processing several billion instructions…per second! So when things start to go wrong, they can quickly affect performance. Registry settings that become obsolete or include errors, memory getting trapped by greedy programs, interdependent program files scattered around the hard drive, unwanted programs sneaking into your start up menu, junk files and remnants building up – they are all happening as you work. And it’s all happening faster than you can possibly hope to keep up with it. Imagine a large, busy bakery factory running 24/7 that never gets cleaned and stacks supplies haphazardly all over the place. How long do you think they’d stay in business? An operation like this would even struggle with weekly or daily maintenance. They would have to keep up an ongoing maintenance to keep their head above water. System optimizing has to be more robust than the forces against it. That means any solution that hopes to keep a PC fast and prevent the need for system repair must be automatic, able to recognize and resolve core issues and have the power to quickly fix only what needs to be fixed, without itself becoming a resource drain.

Mistake #3: Thinking system repair is the answer to slow running programs While there may be many reasons why a program runs slow, one of the most common is that it simply isn’t getting the system resources it needs to run as it was designed to. Why? Few people realize that their operating system is set by default to an “balanced power mode” designed to hold back processor resources to save energy. But unless all you do is write and send emails, a balanced power mode will leave you dragging. Even today’s “average” programs use more system resources than ever before. They have more extensive files and have often grown two or three times the size they were just a few versions ago. They frequently maintain a connection to online services and demand more memory to run. At the same time, users have gotten into the habit of leaving programs and files open as they multitask and each one draws on system resources. And then there is the proliferation of resource intensive applications such as gaming, video editing, and graphics programs that will drag performance under its wheels unless your system power is focused directly on their operations. Here’s what you can do to remedy this. Click on your start button and go to “search programs and files” field at the bottom. Type “power options” and hit enter.

This is your power plan screen. As you can see, you have three choices: Balanced (average), Power saver and High performance. Activating High Performance mode will favor more CPU power but use more energy – something a laptop user may have concerns about. The speed of your program might still struggle against an environment where many open files are competing for processor resources. While High Performance mode may boost performance in some heavy-demand programs, manually having to switch settings will have you lagging behind your rapidly changing power needs (as noted in Mistake #2). Also, High Performance mode kicks in after a drop in speed and response has already been felt. This is a much better solution.

Summary: No matter what challenges your user experience, keep these points in mind and you’ll make better decisions when it comes to getting the best performance from your PC:

1. Your operating system environment can be tuned better than how it was right out of the box.
2. Despite marketing claims, your operating system was never intended to manage everything.
3. Many issues are not rooted in the operating system itself, but in the unmanaged gaps between the OS, the programs and the various indexes, settings and storage points throughout the system.