“The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.” - Bill Gates

Trimming The Fat

Getting your system running leaner, meaner and faster

Are you starting the year with your machine running at a sluggish pace?

Try following these 5 steps to get it running a little faster again

1. Uninstall Unwanted Apps

Removing unwanted Apps can help your machine run faster, especially if those Apps load at start up. Having a cleanup of old unused apps can breathe a bit of life back in to your machine. Here's how to browse your apps and remove them:

Windows: Click Start, type "add or remove programs", then click on the top search item which matches this:

Take a look through your installed applications. If you see anything you no longer need or use, remove it by clicking the 3-dot menu on the right and selecting "uninstall".

Note: The removal of some applications will require a PC restart to complete.

Mac: Open Finder and Browse your Applications Folder. Drag any Apps you need to remove to the trash bin.

2. Configure Start Up Items

Preventing unnecessary apps from loading up when you start (or restart) your system can stop your machine using up so many of it's precious resources (CPU time, RAM etc) and give you a big performance increase.

Take a look at how to stop un-needed apps from starting up on your system:

Windows: Right click on the start button and Select Settings. Go to Apps > Startup. Alternatively, in the Windows search box, type Startup Apps and open the first item listed. Look at the list of apps and use the toggle to prevent the app loading when Windows does. You can also see the impact the app has on your system performance.

Mac: Open System Settings > General > Login Items then remove any apps you don't need to use straight away when your system starts up. Additionally, take a look at your "Allow in the Background" list and turn off anything which shouldn't be running all the time.

Additionally you can toggle apps loading at system startup from the dock menu:

3. Check your Disk Health

Unhealthy and failing hard disks can be another cause of system sluggishness. Give your system disk a checkover with the following steps:

Windows: Open up windows Explorer and Navigate to This PC:

Right click on your Windows C: drive and select Properties:

From here use the Error Checking and Optimisation features of Windows to check and repair errors, and streamline your disk performance.

Mac: Open the Disk Utility via Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility, then select your Macintosh HD and Run First Aid. This will attempt to fix any errors with your disk.

4. Greedy Apps

Web browsers can be one of the apps with biggest drain on your system resources. This in turn, negatively affects performance.

Be sure to close any unwanted browser tabs to help combat this, and regularly fully close down your web browser itself.

Heavy users of Excel and other apps which can open large files and run complex calculations should save and close their files when not in use. This allows the system to claim back precious memory and run that little bit smoother.

5. Switch it off and on again!

Of course this one has to make the list! But why does restarting actually make things run better?

Well, imagine your PC or Mac is a person, and a restart is a night's sleep. Now imagine keeping that person awake for days on end with no sleep (restart), tasks are bound to start taking a little longer and be a bit sluggish. A restart allows your system to refresh (clear out) its memory and perform at it's best for you. It also allows important updates to be applied, which may help protection you from cyber attacks - so definitely worth the few minutes it takes to restart!

Be sure you select to restart from the menu. For those not sure, closing the laptop lid doesn't actually restart your machine, it just suspends your system and it opens up again in the same state when you open the lid.

We recommend restarting at least once a week, and as soon as you can when a critical update needs to be applied.