Why is my computer so slow? Here is why!

Greg sent me an email earlier today - “Why is my computer so slow even though it’s brand new?”. A couple of email exchanges between us fixed his problem. If you are curious to know what problem his computer faced, it’s mentioned at the end of this post.

By the way, if you are reading this post because your computer is slow as well and want to find why your computer is so slow, know that there are many reasons due to which your computer performs slower than they actually should.

The main factors that affect the performance of your computer are as follows.

• The amount of RAM in your system.
• The number of applications running simultaneously.
• The amount of RAM that the running applications consume.
• The processor speed and the overall CPU utilization.
• The hard disk capacity, free space on disk and the hard disk type.
• Spyware, Adware and other malwares in your system.

Here are some recommendation that could possibly improve the performance of your slow computer, with immediate effect.

Upgrade the RAM - If your computer is still running on 128MB or 256MB RAM, I recommend that you consider an upgrade. Anything less than 512 MB will be obviously slow. Not because less RAM guarantees slow performance, it’s because of the operating system that eats away a major portion of the memory. RAM chips are a lot cheaper now than what they used to be. Upgrading your computer’s RAM will give you an immediate boost and visible performance difference.

Remove applications from start-up - As we keep installing applications, most of them make their way into the start-up list and automatically launch and sit in the system tray even if you don’t need them. Just get rid of such applications from startup list and free up a lot of memory.

The hard drive - A very old and slower hard disk alone can drastically affect the performance of your computer. As the hard drive becomes older, the read and write activity on the disk takes significantly longer to process than before. A new hard disk could dramatically boost the performance of your computer. That’s exactly what I did to my 4 years old computer.

Greg’s problem, with his slow computer, was resolved by removing an entry from the start-up list. The software that he had downloaded was a shareware game that connected to Internet to update the highest scores list and every time Greg started his PC, the application also loaded up. The software was buggy, I think, and consumed almost 50% of his system’s memory. Ah!

For more tips and details to handle your slow system, see troubleshooting slow system issues.