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Why is
my pc SLOW?
There are a lot of reasons why a computer may seem like its getting slower and slower. We'll cover a few of the ones that can be easily remedied really quickly.
Computer Needs More RAM (Computer Memory)
This is probably the number one reason people question the slow speed of their PC. A long time ago I remember programming on computers with 64k of RAM. At the time it was sufficient for
everything people needed to run. A bit later computers came out with 128k of RAM and after that suddenly we were past 1 megabyte. The amount of RAM kept getting bigger and bigger so programmers built programs to take advantage of that, packing them out with more and more features.
In this day and age, most contemporary computers have at least 512 megabytes of RAM. This is approximately 8224 times more RAM than the little computer I used to program on had. Programs today are major resource hogs. A typical game can easily eat up more than a gigabyte of hard drive space and a tremendous portion of your RAM.
When the programs you are running consume more RAM than you have in your computer Windows uses your hard drive to simulate the RAM it needs to do the job. The portion of the hard drive that Windows uses for this is called a swap file. An easy way to spot this is when you're trying to do things on your incredibly slow computer and the hard drive is constantly making its noise or the hard drive light is constantly blinking. Consequently, the hard drive is many hundreds of times slower than your computer's RAM so if your computer is using the swap file alot it will be incredibly slow.
If this is the case your best bet would be to have more RAM put into your computer. You can never have too much RAM and it's fairly cheap. A large increase in RAM will almost always bring a sizeable increase in speed.
The Hard Drive Needs Defragmented or is Too Full
This is common with computers that have been around awhile or are used heavily. If your hard drive is getting full you will have to decide if there are any programs you can do without and uninstall them through the Windows control panel. See Add-Remove Software. Note: Never simply delete a program unless that is the way the instructions specify to uninstall it. Doing so could damage your Windows installation. When possible always use add remove programs in the Windows control panel.
If your hard drive is getting fragmented you will need to run defrag to get things all lined out. When a hard drive stores information it picks an empty spot and writes until it runs out of room. After that it picks another empty spot, leaves a pointer from the first spot to the second and continues writing. This process repeats until the file is written entirely to the hard drive.
This means that files on your computer may be broken into several different chunks. This is called fragmentation. The more fragmented your hard drive is the faster it becomes fragmented. Running defrag on your hard drive arranges the files so that they can all reside on your hard drive in one piece. The fewer pieces the computer has to look for to load a file the faster things will work. This is also the case when the computer is writing files.
To run defrag on your hard drive open my computer, right click on your hard drive and click properties. After that move to the tools tab and click on defragment now.
You Need a New Computer
I've seen this a lot too. Sometimes you've just got to let go of the old computer. If it looks like Jim Kirk's desktop in Star Trek that's a good indication that you should look for a new computer. A decent home computer with fairly good capabilities can be found for as low as $299 these days. Don't torture yourself with technology from the dinosaur age.
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