Your Windows PC is a complicated beast. Even if it’s just a humble little laptop, or it’s all running on a tablet, there are an extraordinarily large number of (digital) moving parts that mostly run completely invisibly in the background. These parts fill up over time and cause your PC to run extremely slowly or just act up as its memory fills up, Remember HAL’s memory banks in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Yeah, like that.
All you know is that the lovely, fast computer you brought home from the store is now the sluggish beast that takes the joy out of computing for you. Not to mention the older PC you gave your children for games and the shiny new laptop your college freshman took with them for school.
Of course, all computer systems slow down the longer you use them. We humans have a tendency to collect (and later forget) programs, demos, trials, games and apps that seem cool one moment, and are completely useless the next, These background apps suck the life out of your PC as they add up. Don’t forget the possibility of your computer getting infected with malware as well.
Still, there’s something about the Windows architecture that seems to lend itself to systems becoming bogged down. It’s true whether you’re running Windows 7, Windows 8 or even the latest “Anniversary Edition” of Windows 10.
Fortunately, there are some solutions to help you speed up your computer, one of which is the slick and easy-to-use AVG Tuneup.
With just a click or two it can speed up your computer, improve battery life by killing the background processes I mentioned above and apps that aren’t essential, and clean up junk files that are stored on your PC. In case you don’t know, a computer with lots of free disk space actually runs faster than one that’s 99% full. In fact, take it from me, don’t fill up your computer disks with large or unwanted files. Weird and bad things happen.
This time of year, there’s another consideration too: your darling child might have flitted off to college, like my oldest, and now has a computer that is essential for their success in school. One that you can’t keep an eye on. It’s also best to load it up with AVG Ultimate: you get both products in one package rather than having to buy them separately, in my opinion!
Not convinced? The team at AVG says that using AVG Tuneup can speed up a Windows PC’s startup time by 77%, free up to 75 GB of space and extend your battery life by 117%. Pretty darn important, if you ask me.
The good news is that you don’t have to muck about with Microsoft Windows cryptic internal settings or become a developer to improve your computer’s performance. In fact, AVG Tuneup is really quite easy to use and install. You can see, here’s the opening screen, and it’s already working on making my PC work better:
Ready to proceed? Simply let it do its thing and AVG Tuneup will whir away and identify way more problems on your computer than you ever might have imagined were lurking.
When my copy finished running its diagnostics, it had identified a staggering 600 issues:
I let the program fix all of my issues, used it to axe some of the background tasks that really weren’t essential (sorry, Apple, just because I install iTunes it doesn’t mean I need to have the helper app running 24×7 in background), restarted and yes, my Windows PC does seem faster. Win!
Rather surprisingly, keeping your Windows PC in tip-top order can be quite a task, and when that computer might be hundreds or thousands of miles away in a dorm, well, it’s at least 10x harder. So make sure you equip your children’s college laptops with AVG products, and teach your kids how to run an occasional malware scan and utilize AVG Tuneup to ensure there’s nothing bogging down their systems.
This way, the phone calls late at night will be about money and how hard classes are, how dorm food isn’t as good as your home cooking, but not about how the PC isn’t working and how they need an expensive new one.
Disclaimer: AVG and Life Of Dad sponsored this post and made review copies of AVG Tuneup and AVG Antivirus available to me for the purposes of this writeup. My opinions are nonetheless my own, however.