Computers are notorious for slowing down with old age, but there are a few tips and tricks to give them a speed boost.

From small tweaks to your settings to purchasing some new RAM, there's plenty of options for everyone's budget and skillset.

So before you toss your computer aside for a new one, try out these suggestions to get your PC chugging along again.

Run cleanup programs frequently.

CCleaner is an amazing app that will help you find and delete caches and temporary files in many of your applications. You can download CCleaner here.

Remove unnecessary visual effects and animations.

Yes — some of these things you'll be removing make your operating system look nice, but wouldn't you rather have a speedier computer?

On Windows 7, try disabling the pretty albeit resource-hungry "Aero" theme. Right click your desktop and then click "Personalize." Choose the "Window Color" tab and then uncheck "Enable transparency."

Update and use your antivirus software.

Viruses and malware can bog down your computer in a hurry, so it's best to prevent them in the first place. If you're using a free trial of antivirus software whose notifications are as annoying as a virus itself, uninstall it and try using Microsoft's free Security Essentials antivirus software, which won't bombard you with ads.

To stay diligent, try scheduling daily quick scans and weekly full scans.

Buying the perfect wedding gift is a science. The formula calls for exact measurements of thought, practicality, and humor. 

If you fail, the internet will make sure you never forget.

We scrolled through three wedding gift forums on Weddingbee, Reddit, and DISboards and plucked out the most bizarre gifts. 

If you have a wedding coming up, treat this as guide to what not to buy.  

SEE ALSO: 5 wedding gifts that seem like a good idea but can actually be disastrous

FOLLOW US: BI Lifestyle is on Twitter

 "A relationship advice book for couples over 50. [My] fiance and I just turned 30 and 32."— SamanthaLovesJames, Weddingbee

"A book on how to convert your spouse to your religion one of my relatives gave us."— Jaya, DISboards

"My uncle got us a book on how to deal with divorce."— whistledick, Reddit

"A package of paper plates."—pigletgirl, DISboards

"I got towels with the name 'Mary' on them. My name is not Mary… nor even an M name."— Schatzie821, Weddingbee

"The sky above us is an essential part of our nature," Babak Tafreshi said in a statement announcing the winners of this year's International Earth and Sky Photo Contest.

Tafreshi established the program The World at Night (TWAN), which co-founded this annual photo contest in 2008. The goal of the contest is to raise awareness about light pollution, which drowns our view of planets, stars, and galaxies in the night sky — a sight that is growing more rare each year as cities swell bigger and brighter.

"Perhaps from this perspective we can better preserve the natural night sky and reconnect it with our modern life," Tafreshi said about the contest.

Here are the 10 award-winning photos for this year, selected from an initial pool of over 1,000. You can learn more about the contest on the TWAN website.

The bright band of the Milky Way Galaxy is a beautiful backdrop to this photo of Mt. Rainier in Washington state.

Mount Bromo is the smoking, distant volcano in this photo composition taken in East Java, Indonesia with star trails — the arcs of light in the sky — in the background.

City lights illuminate the clouds in this photo of Russia's northern Caucasus Mountains. Peak Terskol Observatory sits at the center against a starry night sky.

If you've got just a few hours to boost your business savvy, we've got you covered. These 11 documentary films offer in-depth looks at entrepreneurs, companies, and big ideas you might only be superficially familiar with.

From a film on Wal-Mart's business practices to one on aspiring sommeliers, each will simultaneously entertain and educate you about business.

What it really takes to launch a company

If you think that starting and building a company is like a real-life version of "The Social Network," think again. The 2014 documentary miniseries "startupland" takes viewers through the development of five businesses enrolled in a tech accelerator, showing how scary the experience really is. Each episode features interviews with well-known business execs and entrepreneurs, including Reddit's Alexis Ohanian and AOL's Steve Case. (The feature film "startupland," from the same creators, comes out this year.)

How a personal-care line became an accidental success

The face on Burt's Bees products belongs to Burt Shavitz, a beekeeper who never anticipated that he'd found a billion-dollar international brand. "Burt's Buzz" tells the story of Shavitz's career, starting from his days as a young New York City photojournalist. Viewers also learn about Shavitz's complicated relationship with cofounder Roxane Quimby, who eventually bought Shavitz out and sold the business to the Clorox company.

How to turn your passion into a profession

"Somm" follows a group of four men preparing for the master sommelier exam, a test with one of the lowest pass rates in the world. Their obsession with getting ready for the exam consumes them as well as the people closest to them. The film will inspire you to pursue your own ambitions, however lofty they may seem.

In general, nine out of 10 startups fail. 

But the ones who make it all have one thing in common: a brilliant idea.

Like these self-made billionaires did with their companies.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were PhD students at Stanford when they first came up with the idea of a search engine. But their idea was a little different than the other search engines in the market: it would examine the number and relevance of links between pages, not just the keywords on them.

Google's search engine now dominates the market, and the company has more than $66 billion in sales. It's now involved in other businesses too — it makes the most popular mobile phone platform in the world (Android) and runs the most popular video web site in the world (YouTube). It's also experimenting with all kinds of futuristic projects like Google Glass (seen here). Page and Brin are now each worth almost $30 billion.

Mark Zuckerberg was a Harvard undergrad when he came up with the idea of a "hot or not" type of website called Facemash. From that site, Zuckerberg learned how technology could be used to connect people and launched a site called thefacebook.com.

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NOW WATCH: Someone figured out the purpose of the extra shoelace hole on your running shoes — and it will blow your mind

Victoria's Secret's Pink brand is the company's line aimed primarily at a younger, collegiate audience.

The hot brand recently announced its newest face, Rachel Hilbert, a 20-year-old former competitive skier hailing from Rochester, NY.

We talked to Hilbert and learned more about her background. 

Hilbert's modeling career kicked off when she was young. "Everyone in my hometown used to tell me I should try modeling. So when I was 15 I came down to NYC with my mom to open calls, and it happened from there," she said.

📷 by: @ellistonlutz 💙💜💙

A photo posted by Rachel Hilbert (@rachelhilbert) on Feb 25, 2015 at 4:50am PST

Hilbert modeled for Victoria's Secret Pink in the past but is thrilled with her new position. "What I like most working with Victoria's Secret Pink is I really get to be myself during the shoots, and I absolutely love everything I wear."

She's no stranger to the modeling scene, having already booked campaigns with Urban Outfitters, Express, Delia’s, and Konis.

Source: IMG Models

Apple is currently running a sale on its favorite action, adventure, and fantasy iPhone games, and everything is at least 50% off.

The collection features plenty of timeless classics along with popular newcomers too, with award-winning titles including Badland, Limbo, and Final Fantasy IV.

The sale is only happening for a limited time, however, so you'd better act fast before the low prices disappear.

Ravensword: Shadowlands is like Skyrim for your iPhone.

With beautiful graphics that are powered by Unity and a huge open world to explore, Ravensword: Shadowlands lets you customize your hero as you adventure through the Kingdom of Tyreas. There's a reflex-based combat system, ragdoll physics, five different weapons types, charactere classes, and even flying mounts and horses to help you get around.

Price: $2.99 (usually $6.99)

Badland is a sidescroller game with beautiful graphics.

Badland is an award-winning action adventure game with 80 unique single-player levels, and the game's gorgeous graphics are some of the best we've seen. Your objective is to guide a creature through creepy environments and beat objectives and challenges, and a multiplayer mode lets up to four players play with he same device.

Price:$1.99 (usually $3.99)

Terraria is like 2D version of Minecraft but with a few twists.

Terraria is a charming 2D game that dances along a few different genres, mixing together the creation aspects of games like "Minecraft" along with crafting and battle elements that will keep you hooked.

Price: $1.99 (usually $4.99)

Boutique hotels often pull a bigger punch than big hotels: They tend to be more exclusive, intimate, and unique than major chain hotels.

Hotels.com sent us an exclusive list of the 30 best boutique hotels in the US.

To come up with this list, they looked at thousands of boutique hotels around the US, and selected the 30 hotels with the highest guest review ratings.

30. The Delafield Hotel, Delafield, WI

Rooms from $189 per night.

29. Hotel Marisol Coronado, Coronado, CA

Rooms from $299 per night.

28. Oglethorpe Lodge, Savannah, GA

Rooms from $199 per night.

It happens in a moment of inspiration.

You get an idea for the next great app. Move over, Snapchat. Move over, Twitter. Move over, Instagram. This is going to be a big deal. 

But there's one thing you don't know. How to get it from your head into the App Store, onto the 700 million iPhones Apple has sold, and onwards towards glory, fame, and venture capital funding. 

Read on to find out how iPhone apps are made.

The first step is the most costly: A $99 annual enrollment into the Apple Developer Program, which entitles you to make apps for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, plus Safari browser extensions.

Apple's developer program also lets you try the early preview versions of the next versions of iOS and the Mac OS, so you can make sure your app works with them.

Next, you need Xcode 7, Apple's development software, which is included in that $99 annual fee. The bad news is that it's for Mac OS X only, making life difficult for Windows developers.

What could be more terrifying than talking to someone you're attracted to? 

Luckily, social science has figured out what makes flirting work — or not.

Couples need to flirt, too.

Like Tinder, cats, and dying alone, flirting is usually associated with single people. 

But couples need to know how to flirt, too.

After studying 164 married people for a 2012 study, University of Kentucky researcher Brandi Frisby noted that most of them flirted as a means of maintaining and emphasizing intimacy. Oftentimes, she wrote in her paper, married couples flirted to "create a private world with the spouse." 

People flirt for six different reasons.

In a 2004 review of the literature on flirting, Northern Illinois University professor David Dryden Henningsen identified six different motivations for the behavior: 

• Sex: trying to get in bed 
• Fun: treating it like a sport
• Exploring: trying to see what it would be like to be in a relationship
• Relational: trying to increase the intimacy of a relationship
• Esteem: increasing one's own self esteem
• Instrumental: trying to get something from the other person

In that study, Henningsen asked 101 female and 99 male students to write out a hypothetical flirty conversation between a man and a woman, then identify the motivations for the things they said. 

The behaviors broke down along gender norms: Men were significantly more likely to have a sexual motivation, while women tended to have a relational one.

Some conversation starters are better than others.

For a study in the journal Sex Roles, University of Alaska psychologist Chris L. Kleinke asked 600 respondents to rate the effectiveness of three varieties of opening lines in a flirtatious situation: 

• "Pick-up" lines like "You must be a librarian, because I saw you checking me out" 

• Open-ended, innocuous questions like "What do you think of this band?" or "What team are you rooting for?"

• Direct approaches like "You're cute — can I buy you a drink?" 

The responses were pretty evenly split along gender lines: While the men in the study tended to prefer the more direct approach, the women tended to prefer the open-ended, innocuous questions. Not surprisingly, very few people said they preferred the pick-up lines.

According to research from Pew, there are approximately 75 million millennials — those between the ages of 18 and 34 — in the US right now.

This group is known for a lot of things. One of them: job hopping.

So, there's a good chance that if you're a millennial reading this, you're on the hunt for a new gig.

To help you decide what to do next — or, if you're a recent grad just joining the workforce, to guide you in the right direction — jobs site CareerCast has put together a list of the best jobs for millennials.

To compile the list, CareerCast looked at salary and growth outlook data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Advertising account executive

Annual median salary: $115,750

Projected growth outlook (by 2022): 12%

Education required: A bachelor's degree is required for most advertising management positions.

Civil engineer

Annual median salary: $79,340

Projected growth outlook (by 2022): 20%

Education required: A bachelor's degree in civil engineering or civil engineering technology. They typically need a graduate degree and licensure for promotion to senior positions. 

Computer systems analyst

Annual median salary: $79,680

Projected growth outlook (by 2022): 25%

Education required: A bachelor's degree in a computer or information science field is common, although not always a requirement.

It's no secret that reading can help you get ahead. The most accomplished people tend to love to read.

However, starting a new book can seem daunting and overly time-consuming. The good news is there are several short business books loaded with powerful information about selling, managing, and investing. 

We compiled a list of the best business books with less than 150 pages that you can start and finish in an afternoon.

'Who Moved My Cheese?' by Spencer Johnson

"Who Moved My Cheese?" made it on "Shark Tank" investor Daymond John's list of business books that changed his life. 

Johnson's parable was an instant hit when it came out in 1998 and has continued to be a bestseller over the past decade. It tells the story of two mice, Scurry and Sniff, and two sprite-like people, Hem and Haw, living in a maze where the location of the cheese suddenly begins changing every day.

Johnson wrote the book as the internet started becoming more accessible, causing companies around the world to adapt and learn new ways of doing business. Its lessons on how to let go of a fear of change are timeless.

'As a Man Thinketh' by James Allen

This short classic should be on every entrepreneur's bookshelf. Published in 1902, "As a Man Thinketh" contains wisdom that transcends time. Author and coach Tony Robbins says he often recommends it to people "because it's so small and easy to read and so profound." He's read it at least a dozen times. 

In the book, Allen emphasizes that your life is completely under your control rather than in the hands of fate, luck, or external circumstances. To be successful, he says you must first be successful in your mind. 

'How to Lie with Statistics' by Darrell Huff

If "How to Lie with Statistics" worked for Bill Gates, it could work for you. The business magnate and bookworm included Huff's 150-page book about how statistics can be deceptive on his list of summer must-reads.

Although it was written in 1954, Gates promises it doesn't feel dated. Rather, it will make you feel smarter and more skeptical of the things you read.

While many people in ad land claim their lives are not like the "Mad Men" days of the 1960s, their lifestyles still tend to be glamorous.

Plane-hopping to clients' overseas offices, parties, long Martini lunches, and the biggest calendar event of the year — the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity — you can follow it all through the lens of Instagram.

We've picked out some of the best advertising and marketing executives' accounts to follow on Instagram. We've weighted our rankings using a (not entirely mathematical) scale of how often the user posts, and whether their pictures are beautifully shot/aspirational/offer an insight into their working life/or simply brighten up people's Instagram feeds.

29. Tim Armstrong, AOL CEO. WHY? Armstrong only first started posting on Instagram 11 weeks ago, and it's mostly been work-related to date. But life at AOL is about to get a lot more exciting after Verizon's acquisition.

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28. Robin Grant, founder and global managing director at We Are Social. WHY? He goes to all the best social media parties.

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27. Darren Herman, VP of content services, strategy, revenue generation, and business development at Mozilla. WHY? Tennis, tech, food, and more tennis.

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Still feeling guilty about that second cup of coffee? Chances are you shouldn't be.

Whether you start each day with a latte or rely on a shot of espresso to get over the midafternoon hump, a healthy, moderate caffeine habit can provide many health benefits.

This doesn't mean you should go guzzling energy drinks or pounding espresso shots. Using too much caffeine or any other stimulant can be dangerous.

In moderation, though, a caffeine habit could be good for you.

It boosts our memory.

Caffeine has been shown to improve certain types of memory in some (but not all) studies, especially the ability to remember lists of words and straightforward information. Some research shows that it helps those memories “stick” in the brain as well, making it easier to recall that information at a later time.

One recent study indicates that extroverts get more of a working-memory boost from caffeine than introverts. This may explain why some studies find a more significant effect than others. Stephen Braun, the author of “Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine,” explains that individual reactions to caffeine vary greatly: while one person might thrive on a high level of caffeine, it'll make another person unable to get anything done.

This enhancement, however, seems to be strongest for people who aren’t already hooked on caffeine in the first place, and too much caffeine can actually lead to a decrease in performance. 

And improves our mood.

As a central nervous system stimulant, caffeine doesn’t just boost alertness, it can also improve your mood and is even associated with a reduced risk of depression — especially when consumed in the form of coffee.

Even though too much of any stimulant can make people anxious and irritable, a mild dose has been shown to boost mood. This is due to the same adenosine-blocking effect that makes you feel alert. By blocking adenosine’s relaxing effects, caffeine lets dopamine and glutamine, another natural stimulant produced by your brain, run wild, making you more alert, less bored, and providing a mood boost.

Interestingly, a number of studies have found a connection between caffeine consumption and a reduced risk of depression (and even a lower risk of suicide). However, at least one of these studies specifically found this connection with caffeinated coffee but not tea, though others found the same effect for tea as well.

It wakes us up.

It’s natural to grow increasingly tired throughout the day — our brains naturally produce more and more of a molecule called adenosine from the time we wake up until the time we go to sleep. Scientists think this helps us get to bed at night.

Caffeine hijacks this natural process by mimicking adenosine in the brain. It latches onto the receptors designed for adenosine, pushing them out of the way. As a result, we’re left feeling more alert and awake.

Behind every executive, there's an unofficial advisory committee who helped make their success happen: mentors, colleagues, partners — and, in more than a few cases, dads.

In honor of Father's Day, we've collected the best advice super-successful business leaders ever got from their dads. 

A little fatherly wisdom (probably) won't make you into Richard Branson — but a good dose of dad advice certainly can't hurt. 

Here's the advice:

Meg Whitman: Be nice

While "be nice" may sound like a platitude, the Hewlett-Packard CEO said it's some of the most important advice she ever got. 

"I'll never forget my father telling me that," Whitman recalled in Fortune. "I had been mean to someone. He said, 'There is no point in being mean to anyone at any time. You never know who you're going to meet later in life. And by the way, you don't change anything by being mean. Usually you don't get anywhere.'"

T. Boone Pickens: Have a plan

The chairman of BP Capital Management was a student at Oklahoma State when his dad arrived on campus for his fraternity initiation — and delivered a life-changing message. 

"A fool with a plan can outsmart a genius with no plan any day," he told Pickens. "And your mother and I think we have a fool with no plan. We think you’re wasting your time here in Stillwater. You’re not getting anywhere."

His dad was right, Pickens wrote on LinkedIn. "I had to admit I wasn’t burning up the place." But within a month of that visit, everything changed. He picked a track and switched his major. "I got a plan," he says, "and I've had one ever since."

Bill Gates: Do what you're not good at

These days, the former Microsoft CEO and his lawyer father give each other advice as cochairs of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but back in the day, the elder Gates was the one doling out counsel to his son. 

The most important lesson Gates ever learned from his dad? Invest in things — even if you're not good at them. In a conversation with Fortune, he recalled that both his parents encouraged him to "to go out for a lot of different sports like swimming, football, soccer," he says. "At the time I thought it was kind of pointless, but it ended up really exposing me to leadership opportunities and showing me that I wasn't good at a lot of things, instead of sticking to things that I was comfortable with." 

His father agrees that those early forced softball team memberships seem to have worked out okay. "Apparently it turned out to be good advice."

If there's one habit most super-successful people share, it's this: They read. A lot.

Many of them have shared the books that helped shape them personally and professionally. If you want to emulate these titans of industry, reading their faves seems like a good place to start.

From classic literature to business management guides, we rounded up their top picks, so you can start stocking your shelves.

'The Intelligent Investor' by Benjamin Graham

Among Wall Streeters, Graham is known as the father of value investing. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett credits Graham's book with laying the foundation for his investment philosophy when he read it at age 19.

"To invest successfully over a lifetime does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information,"Buffett said. "What's needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding that framework. This book precisely and clearly prescribes the proper framework. You must provide the emotional discipline."

Buy it here >>

'Making the Modern World' by Vaclav Smil

This book by an environmental sciences professor focuses on the costs of increasing material consumption and the potential for dematerialization in the future.

Bill Gates, estimated to be the richest man on earth, calls Smil his favorite author and says the book gave him new insight into the materials that make modern life possible.

"It might seem mundane, but the issue of materials — how much we use and how much we need — is key to helping the world's poorest people improve their lives,"Gates writes."Think of the amazing increase in quality of life that we saw in the United States and other rich countries in the past 100 years. We want most of that miracle to take place for all of humanity over the next 50 years."

Buy it here >>

'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' by Douglas Adams

This work of science fiction helped billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk through an existential crisis during his adolescence. In the book, a supercomputer deduces the answer to a meaningful life is the number 42, though it's not clear what the original question was.

"It highlighted an important point, which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer," Musk said in an interview. "And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. So, to the degree that we can better understand the universe, then we can better know what questions to ask."

Buy it here >>

Happy Father's Day!

There are a lot of fathers and sons in Hollywood, but not all of them have starred together in the same movie.

Then there's Ben and Jerry Stiller who have appeared together in a total of four films.

In celebration of Father's Day, here are 13 fathers who starred in movies with their sons. 

Additional reporting by Ana Douglas and Melia Robinson

Will Smith and son Jaden both appeared in 2013's sci-fi movie "After Earth."

Comedic father-and-son duo, Ben and Jerry Stiller have appeared together in "The Heartbreak Kid,""Zoolander,""Heavyweights," and "Hot Pursuit."

Three generations of the Douglas clan—Kirk, Michael and Cameron—starred together in "It Runs in the Family."

This year, Stanford University topped our lists as the the best and most selective college in the US. As such, it attracts an extremely talented and intelligent study body.

The northern California university has educated household names including Yahoo's Marissa Mayer, golf legend Tiger Woods, and US President Herbert Hoover. 

Surprisingly, many of Stanford's most successful students never actually finished their degrees: 11 of the 30 people to make our list never crossed the podium to receive their diploma, but instead left the university to pursue already promising careers.

Evan Spiegel, the co-founder and CEO of Snapchat, runs his multi-billion dollar company with a former fraternity brother, Bobby Murphy. Spiegel dropped out of school in 2012, just before receiving his degree, in order to dedicate himself fully to Snapchat. He has turned down multiple buy-out offers for the company.

Source: Forbes, Business Insider

Reese Witherspoon began acting at the age of 12 and attended Stanford University for only one year in 1994 before dropping out to pursue her career, which had her flying to Hollywood every weekend while in school.

Source: Huffington Post

Tiger Woods' golf career was already off to an impressive start while he was a student at Stanford University, where he won numerous awards. Woods studied economics for two years, and left the university in 1995 to play golf professionally.

Source: Stanford Men's Golf, Time

Volcanic eruptions have sculpted the landscape, buried cities and reshaped the course of history.

When volcanoes blow their tops, they can do so without warning — and with devastating consequences.

In 1996, a leading international volcanology group identified more than a dozen volcanoes that are particularly deserving of study because they have a history of large, destructive eruptions, are close to populated areas, and could erupt again in the near future.

Many of these volcanoes remain active today, and could wreak havoc on communities that live in their shadow.

Mauna Loa, an active volcano on Hawaii's Big Island, is widely considered the largest land volcano on Earth. It has a volume of 18,000 cubic miles! Because of its shape, Mauna Loa is known as a shield volcano. The last time it erupted was 1984, when lava poured out of vents on its northeast rift zone on Pu‘u‘ula‘ula (Red Hill), shown below. No recent eruptions have killed anyone, but they have destroyed villages.

Taal Volcano, located on the island of Luzon, is the second most active volcano in the Philippines. It has erupted violently several times in the past, including a 1911 eruption that killed more than 1,300 people and destroyed homes and livestock. It last erupted in 1977.

Tenerife is the largest island in the Canary Island archipelago, crowned by Pico de Teide volcano. At 12,198 feet above sea level, the peak, shown in this satellite image taken in August 1991, represents the highest elevation in the Atlantic Ocean. Teide has erupted several times since the island was settled in 1402, most recently in 1909.