A thing we hear a lot, especially in our support department is, “geez my computer is running slow for some reason”. While there are many possible reasons why this is occurring, and you can pay your IT guy big dollars to try and speed things up, we thought we would start by giving you a few helpful tips to speed up your computer system.  Typically, the main causes of a slow computer are:

Not enough hard drive space, you can check this by clicking on the “My Computer” icon. In the My computer screen you will see a list of drives (both local and networked) and the amount of used and available space on each drive). If you are running out of space you may need to delete programs or files, format the drive completely or replace the drive with an empty one.

Old programs or cached. Temporary files – Go to control panel – Add/Remove Programs and look at the list. Any programs that you don’t use anymore, or don’t wish to be on your system can be safely removed using this utility (make sure that you have backups of important information before uninstalling a program if required).

Data corruption or hard drive fragmentation issues: Windows has a built in utility for checking the health of your hard drives and fixing corrupted data or useless files that can slow your computer down. The feature is called “Check Disk” and more information can be found at Microsoft Small Business Support

Too many programs running on start up or in the background. This can be changed in the System Configuration Utility and is dependent on which version of Windows you are running.

Out-dated system drivers or operating systems that are not kept up to date can cause system instability, crashes and slowdown of your machine. It’s not only windows updates that you need to keep current, but it is also hardware drivers (i.e. USB devices and controllers) that when out of date can drag down system performance. Keeping them up to date means that everything residing in your computer is doing so as one big happy family.

By following these tips to speed up your computer you can generally get a noticeable increase in system performance. While this article is a generalization of how to speed up systems as a whole, Bizprac users can also make sure that their program is operating to its full potential by doing the following:

• Exclude the Bizprac SQL database file (.fdb) from your antivirus real-time scan
• Make sure that write cache on your hard drive, the Bizprac SQL database file (.fdb) resides on, is switched to ON
• Ensure that Bizprac has the correct privileges to connect to a report or data folder that may be located on a network drive upon start up

Whilst we can live in hope that one day we will all be saying, “wow, my computer is running super fast, I think I’ll be able to finish work by 3’o’clock”… In reality, these tips to speed up your computer just might help us to stop noticing how slow the computer seems.