In case you bought your laptop or PC a few years ago, chances are it’s currently not being able to cope up with all the increased burden you are putting on it consistently. The resource-hungry programs and graphics-heavy games are not running as smoothly as they were when it was brand new, and you are probably seriously considering buying a new set of hardware soon.

Replace your HDD with an SSD: Don’t be alarmed hearing this – you don’t need to invest much to get a lightning-fast SSD. Believe it or not, you can buy a 120 GB SSD for less than 2k Rs. Here’s a pro tip for you – you don’t need 500 GB or 1 TB SSDs that are quite expensive. Do not throw away your old HDD, instead use it to store all of the heavy files that you don’t need frequently, and a new 120 GB SSD to install the OS and run it from there. There will be a noticeable difference with this single change alone and your daily task will be a lot snappier.

Increase your RAM amount: This is 2020 and having a laptop with only 4GB RAM won’t be enough to run the latest Windows 10 or other memory-eating programs comfortably. It’s quite fascinating to think about how a laptop with 4GB RAM was considered top-of-the-line hardware just a few years back, and today they don’t even run the latest Windows 10 without giving you frequent hassles. Considering your laptop uses replaceable SODIMMs, ask your local computer shop for compatible RAMs for the machine. If it has a single 4GB RAM with an empty slot, it will be quite cost-effective to add another 4GB one to double the capacity instantly. Or in case it has no empty slot with a single 4GB unit or uses two 2GB RAMs, then you will have to replace them totally. A 4GB DDR4 unit would cost you less than 2K, and an 8GB single unit can be availed for a little more than 3K easily.

Re-install your OS and start fresh: Do a favour to yourself, and take a full backup of all the necessary files first to avoid losing any important documents and files. Once this initial mandatory step is done, re-install the operating system, and see the difference! Now as you are starting fresh, install only the essential tools and software that you need, not the ones that you think you “might need sometimes in the future” as you can always add additional software later on whenever you need them.

Get rid of viruses and malware: Even you don’t install any software from untrusted third party sources and use only official reputable programs downloaded from the official sites, you are still vulnerable to numerous online threats, viruses, and other adware and malware just by doing casual browsing, giving your browser permission to run javascript, opening emails from unknown senders, and more. And not all these malware start doing noticeable activities to be recognized instantly; in fact, most of them are designed to lurk on your machine for years to leak sensitive data slowly but steadily and spy on whatever you do on your computer. Not only these harmful elements are a risk to your privacy and can cause significant financial loss, but also make your system sluggish over time. They run in the background, often stealthily and undetectably, and thus can’t be identified easily. What you need to do is install a reputable antivirus and antimalware tool and let it run for whatever time it takes to do a full system scan. Of course, the best and safest way would be freshly installing the operating system from scratch, but if you can’t do that for any reason – a good antivirus software would be sufficient to speed up your machine as well as secure it almost immediately.

Uninstall the programs you rarely use: Even new laptops and PCs can come with lots of unwanted bloatware programs that you either never use or use very rarely. These are unavoidable evils for any computer and eat lots of resources to make your system slow as time passes. Therefore, regardless of your laptop is brand new or old, just removing or uninstalling these resource clogging programs can make a heaven and hell difference.

Don’t forget to do an occasional defragment of your HDD: Aged hard drives are prone to generating bad sectors over time. These bad sectors, which are spread across the total surface of the drive, can increase the processing time gradually, making it slower. Doing proper defragmentation will help the good and working sectors arranged neatly, leading to significant performance improvement.

While a brand new laptop with the latest generation hardware will be the safest and most definitive way to be on the track again, that won’t come cheap! And unless you have lots of additional cash to spend, there are ways to give your old laptop a new life and still get at least a respectable level of performance out of it. Keep reading until the end as we are going to reveal some proven ways to make your old pc or laptop work like new. And trust us when you are saying this, you literally don’t need more than a little money, a set of screwdrivers, and a bit of patience to follow the processes we will explain. So, without further ado, let’s get started.