You may find yourself asking yourself, “Why is my computer so slow?” The fact of the matter is that there are many possible answers to this question. There are simply a lot of things that can potentially slow down your computer. Some of these things are fairly simple to take care of. But, there are others that can be a lot more difficult and some of them are even potentially harmful to your computer.
Part of knowing how to solve this problem of a slow computer is knowing when your computer starting running more slowly. Is it a new (less than one year old) computer that you have? Did this slowness begin suddenly, or do recall that it seems to have been building up over time and then it finally got to a point where you are now noticing it quite a lot? Did you just put a new, very large program on your hard drive that may be taking up a great deal of RAM memory? Have you been a download junkie who can’t resist installing a new program on a constant basis?
If you take a careful look, you’ll find that there’s really nothing mystical in the answer to the question, “Why is my computer so slow?” But, the answer to the question might just take you by surprise.
Well, always begin an investigation into this matter by doing a disk cleanup. Assuming you have a Windows OS, you’ll find this at Start/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Clean Up. This program scans your computer for superfluous files that you probably don’t need any longer. These are mostly Java Applets and the temporary folders that get opened up whenever you browse a new website, and things of that nature. The program will find them all, queue them up to be deleted, tell you how much space you will free up when they are trashed, and then ask you to make sure you want to delete them. You may find that your computer starts running faster after this, and you should now get into the habit of doing disk cleanup once a week.
But, what if that doesn’t help much? Then it’s time to look a little deeper.
What If You Have a Hard Drive That’s Too Full?
This is one of the simplest slow poke problems to have. You might just be nearing the end of your computer’s current memory storage capacity. This means that your computer is trying to juggle too much information at once, and just as when you have tons of information swirling around in your head about something, it’s finding it extra hard to access the correct data. This could definitely be the problem if you just downloaded a couple of very large programs such as complex video games.
You will need to go through your programs and files and start deleting some if it turns out that you have most of your memory filled up, which you can find out about by going to Control Panel and taking a look at your Hard Drive. If your computer has more RAM capacity, like a second hard drive that you have but have not activated, consider upgrading and increasing your RAM. You can also preserve your files and programs on an external hard drive and/or a flash USB drive.
What If Your Computer Has Registry Problems?
This one can be a little more difficult. Your computer’s registry is like its DNA and its life experience memories all wrapped up together. If you are rather new to this kind of problem, don’t try to repair your own registry. Download a program that will scan your registry for you -the download and scan are usually free, and you only pay when it deems you need to fix a registry problem. If the program says that you need to fix some registry keys, enable it to do that for you. Advanced users might try to do this themselves because they want to make sure nothing they want to keep gets “fixed”.
What If Your Computer Is Running Too Many Programs At Once?
Well, you might have programs running simultaneously that are over-taxing your computer’s memory or interfering with each other. A lot of times, this is because you have a ton of programs set up to automatically boot up when you start your computer or bring it back out of hibernation. Some registry key fixer programs will also act as a program manager for you and reconfigure your boot-up so that this doesn’t happen. If you don’t use one of them, take a look at your systems tray (the space on the right on the bar down at the bottom of your computer’s screen, where the clock and Internet connection status are found). If you have a ton of icons in there, this could be your problem; so right-click some of them and disable them from automatic start-up.
Are You the Victim of Spyware or Malware?
Well, if all else fails to solve your slowness problem, and you are very certain you have not just downloaded huge programs, and you find that your computer’s slowness came on quite suddenly, the bad news is you have got spyware or other malware on your computer. If you don’t know how it could have gotten there-that’s the whole point (from the perspective of the people who sent it to you). It probably came from an innocent-seeming e-mail or was on a website that you visited. Download or install and run a spyware scanner to find the problem and get it fixed before your computer is harmed or you become the victim of identity theft. Since prevention is better than cure, from now on have a spyware scanner program installed that does a regular scan (every 24 hours or every 12). These programs are usually free to install and have scan for you, and you would pay to have any spyware or other malware removed.
So, if you find yourself asking the mirror, “Why is my computer so slow?”, you now have some solutions.