Today we’re going to talk about improving your PC’s performance beyond the basic steps we’ve already covered. Most likely, your computer is working fine until you start stressing it, at which point it will obviously slow down as it has additional demands.

However, there are times when your system just freezes and doesn’t seem to want to budge — like it’s stuck in mud and switching between apps seems to take a long time. If your system is running slower, then most likely it is.

Many performance issues can simply be traced back to too much overhead and too few resources. In other words, your computer can only handle so many processes running at the same time before it starts showing signs of stress. This may manifest as long loading or loading times, or applications freezing or freezing, or the computer may show signs of instability such as blue screens or sudden restarts.

This is a lesson in practical advice, and this is where we’ll talk about improving your diagnostic skills with the almighty «Task Manager», which is much more useful than its simple name.

However, before we do that, we’re going to dive into something very important that is very often neglected by many PC users: updates.

How to update things

If your system is not updated regularly, it may be compromised and open to attacks from hackers. Microsoft regularly releases security patches and updates, and if your system is not configured to download and install them automatically, or you are not too diligent in checking, downloading, and installing these updates, then you are putting your system at risk.

Perhaps even more important, however, are those other small programs that don’t always get stellar treatment: Oracle Java, Adobe Flash, and Adobe Reader. While we covered these plugins in the previous chapter, we want to re-emphasize how important it is to keep these types of software, indeed any software, up to date.

Windows Update

Windows provides a utility called «Windows Update» that allows you to keep your system patched and protected (to some extent) from any malicious attempts to access and take control of your computer.

The first time you create a master or administrator account on a fresh Windows installation, you’ll be asked if you want updates to download and install automatically, or if you want to do it manually. We highly recommend that you let Windows take care of the update.

However, if you think you want to handle this part of PC maintenance, you need to know how to use Windows Update so that you never miss a critical update.

To open Windows Update, you need to open the Control Panel. This is true for Windows 8.x or Windows 7. In Windows 8.x, you can also update your system through «PC Settings» in the Metro interface under «Update and Recovery».

For consistency, let’s stick with the desktop version. Once you get familiar with it, the Metro version is pretty much the same.

When you open Windows Update for the first time, you will see its status, such as «are you set to automatically install updates.» In the following screenshot, we can see that we have 3 three additional optional updates, but we also ran the «check for updates» guide and we can see that we have one important update too.

You can click on the links to see what the updates are. You should install all important updates, but you can be a bit picky about optional updates.

In fact, you can even right-click on an update and hide it so it doesn’t show up on Windows Update anymore.

Don’t worry, if you really need «Bing Bar», «Bing Desktop» or some other hidden update, you can use the «restore hidden updates» feature.