How to Speed Up Your Windows XP Computer for Free in the Comfort of Your Own Home

For those who don't dabble in the IT world, tuning up a computer can seem like a daunting task best left to the professionals. The result is an innocent end user hauling his/her machine to a technician who can charge up to $50 for simple tasks that could have completed in the comfort of your own home for free and it takes less than 20 minutes. One of my passions as an IT professional is teaching these techniques to casual computer users so they can save money and become more informed and pro-active with their own machine.

A good starting point is downloading and installing Mozilla Firefox and use it religiously instead of Internet Explorer. While it doesn't keep all the boogeymen away it is widely-known by IT professionals as the safer choice as it does block out many harmful programs. As soon as you download and install it for the first time you will even be asked if you want to import all of your Internet Explorer bookmarks. If you say yes it is done automatically. Firefox is just as easy to use as IE so it won't seem foreign to you and it will be easy to use. You can download Firefox at: www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ if you are in the US. If not simply go to www.google.com and search for Firefox. You will see the headline "Rediscover the web". Select that link and it will auto-detect your country and language.

Now the number one culprit for slow computers is a combination of Adaware, spyware and malware, all of which are essentially the same though certain programs can vary in degrees of severity. They are not considered viruses yet they can bring computers and Internet performance to a virtual standstill. I cringe when I go to forums where people are having Virtual Memory warnings and others tell them to allow for more virtual memory. That is like covering up the stick of a dirty diaper with air freshener instead of eliminating the dirty diaper to begin with. While more memory is always a good thing, deleting malware will solve these problems as they are processor and memory hogs.