COLUMNIST: Do you have a slow computer?

I sat down the other day and started my Web browser and it took forever to launch. I ran through a routine system diagnostic and didn’t think much of it until I saw my wife’s laptop behaving in the same sluggish manner. It dawned on me then that there’s probably plenty of folks out there with the same problem and they have no idea how to fix it.

Windows comes with tools that will clean things up and get everything feeling snappier. Of course, it could always be spyware, malware or a virus, but I’ll cover those issues in another column as they are a subject unto themselves. Right now we’ll focus on Windows-centric issues and how they can be resolved.

The first order of business is usually to do a disk cleanup. There’s no point in wasting time optimizing a disk with files on it that aren’t being used. In Windows under the Start Menu there is an “Programs” menu, and under the “Programs” menu you will see “Accessories.” This is where most utilities can be found. If you are running Windows Vista or Windows 7, you will need to go to “All Programs” to find the other menus.

In the “System Tools” menu under “Accessories” there are quite a few utilities. The first one we’ll work with is the “Disk Cleanup” tool. When you start it up, it will prompt you for the drive you wish to use. You can do this with any drive, including thumb drives or external USB drives. For now, however, select your the drive upon which Windows resides. It’ll be the one that is automatically selected. If you click “OK,” you will be presented with a checklist with another “OK” button at the bottom. There will be several boxes checked for you. I like to check “Recycle Bin” in addition to what is already checked.

Once you look through the options and decide what you want to delete, click the “OK” button and let it do its work. If you’ve not done this before, it may take a little while to finish.

Now it's time to defragment your disk drive. The way a drive works is that the operating system — in this case, Windows — writes to various sectors on a drive. Sometimes it might start writing a file to one sector, but find that there’s not enough adjacent sectors to finish writing the file, so it skips until it finds more free sectors and resumes writing the file. The problem with this is when you go to access that file, your drive has to skip around to find all of the sectors containing the file, which takes more time than if they were together. Defragmenting your drive takes all these sectors that are alike and moves them so they are adjacent to each other, improving access speed.

Under the “System Tools” menu, you will find an application called “Disk Defragmenter.” When you open it, you will be greeted with a list of all of the drives on your computer. Select which one you want to defragment and click “Analyze.” It will check that drive and recommend if you should defragment it. Sometimes this can take awhile, so do it when you don’t need the computer.

— Senior Production Coordinator Matthew Broughton is taking the “ech” out of tech. E-mail him at mbroughton@florencenews.com.