New PCs come with a whole load of programs you will never use, and you probably don’t even know they exist.

Some programs even run background processes when you load your computer, even though you are not using them.

To remove all these pointless programs, open the Control Panel’s Programs and Features page, and have a trawl through the list of installed software. Uninstall those that you do not need, while being careful to leave programs your computer’s hardware needs (typically their publisher will be listed as the PC maker’s name or as Microsoft).

Temporary files amass on your computer through everyday tasks and can remain on your hard disk, slowing the computer down. Getting rid of these files, including your internet history and cookies, should give you a larger amount of hard disk space, speeding up your PC.

To do this, open “My Computer”, and select your local drive (usually C:\). Select the “Windows” folder and then open the folder titled “Temp”.

3) Install a solid state drive

Hard drives are the biggest cause of slow speeds and especially slow startup speeds on your PC.

While they are not cheap, installing a solid state drive, which have extremely fast read times, can speed up your startup considerably. 

4) More hard drive storage

Even if you make sure to regularly clean out all your temporarily files, if your hard drive becomes 85 per cent full, it’s going to affect your computer’s speed.

If you regularly film videos or use your PC for recording television, then you will want as big a hard drive as you can get, upwards of 1TB in size.

5) More RAM

RAM, which stands for Random Access Memory, is the temporary storage memory used by your computer and is in use when tasks are being executed by different programs. Therefore, the more programs you use, the more RAM you need, and the slower your computer will be if you don’t have enough.

A clear indicator of not having enough RAM is if your computer slows down every time you try and process large files, or it freezes will carrying out several different actions at once.

You can either add more RAM with an extra memory stick or two, or buy getting completely new memory if all the slots are taken. There is theoretically no upper limit on the amount of RAM that you can have with a 64-bit operating system, but in practical terms 4GB is more than enough for most people.

6) Run disk clean up

Windows also includes a built-in disk de-cluttering tool called “Disk Cleanup”.

It searches through the system for unnecessary large files such as temporary Internet files, program installers, and so on.

Open Disk Cleanup by clicking “Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup”.