I recently visited my family, not seeing them often, for dinner. After the event, we went back to their home and my brother took me to his computer stating "My computer is slow and always has pop-ups! Can you help fix it?"
This is not a hard problem to fix, and doesn't require you to buy a new computer (under most circumstances, anyways).
Simply, on his Windows8 PC, I went to the menu and search bar to type "Add or Remove Programs"]" in which I had clicked. Seeing the dozens of unnecessary programs that were installed, I was very surprised. Anywhere from "SaveMoney" to "FreeCoupons" or even "189382njafn" (probably to confuse people?) I also saw "PCSpeed" and "SpeedOptimizer2.0"
Naturally, as anyone else would question, I asked "Did you download these?"
"No, I've never even heard of them."
After a series of questions about installing games, software, or other programs, we came to the conclusion he had been installing programs using "Recommended Settings" thinking it would be faster and make things run better since they were "Recommended."
I cannot stress enough that "Recommended Settings" are not recommended to the user, but to whoever made or holds development access.
Never EVER download a program without looking at the installations first!
I'm not telling you to read every single word in the terms of service, but at least make sure to uncheck the recommended box.
What you can do to fix this problem is do as said in the beginning.. Search for "Add or Remove Programs" and right-click > uninstall to everything you don't know about. DO SOME RESEARCH IF YOU NEED TO to find out what things are. Some things are important to your computer and shouldn't be removed!
A few things I didn't delete were mostly owned by Microsoft or HP.
Hopefully most of you already know of the above, but I'd really like for you ALL to know these "tricks that aren't actually tricks."