Slow Computer Problems

Shouting To Your Computer Doesnt Solve Anything

Fed up of your snail-paced computer? Is your PC aging faster than the rain forests are disappearing? Feeling that annoying lag when running your music player with another game? Worry nothing, as Spotgamers is here to offer you a few general tips, that might make your computer return to that normal speed that make you fall in love with it in the first place.

Computers can seem to run slow for many reasons. There are no magic tricks to speed up a slow computer. One must try to determine the nature of the slowness and what factors are causing it. Is it always slow, or just sometimes? If sometimes, then when is the slowness noticed? Does it take forever for the computer to start up? Are there any error messages or other warnings?

Here are a few PROBABLE reasons why your computer is performing below-par:
* Too many programs and processes runnning
* Malicious processes running
* Inadequate RAM
* Slow Processor Speed


How many programs are running?

Your computer can only do so many things at one time. The bottom right corner of your screen, where the clock shows, is called the "Notification Area". It's where Windows shows icons of the actively running programs. If you see a lot of icons there, it means that your computer may be working too hard. To confuse things a little, Windows XP typically hides these so-called "inactive" icons, see Figure 1. Right click the task bar, and click Properties. You can either clear the checkbox "Hide inactive icons", or else you can click the little double-arrowed button in the notfication area to un-hide these program icons.

Seeing a whole bunch of icons there? Lots of popular programs like AIM, for example, install themselves to start automatically when you start up the computer. Sometimes you can right-click on these notification area icons and get an idea what program they represent. Sometimes you can exit them this way, or change their settings. There are several ways to set things to NOT start up by themselves, thus freeing up your computer's power to do what you want to do.


Cyber-Instrusions: Sudden Slowness

If your computer has gotten a little slower over the years you've had it, you probably wouldn't notice. But a computer that suddenly becomes slow may have a virus or spyware program robbing its resources. Or perhaps some new program was installed? Download something not so good from the internet maybe? Run a virus scan and spyware sweep as a first step in diagnosing a slow computer. If a NOD32 virus scan and a Spy Sweeper sweep come up with nothing, then you might consider re-running these scans with Windows started in "Safe Mode".

Is your RAM sufficient for all the taxing tasks?

The computer's live "working space" is called RAM memory. Not to be confused with the files stored on your hard drive, RAM memory empties out when the computer shuts down. Try this analogy- think of your computer as a desk with file drawers (the hard drive), then think of RAM as the amount of available space you have on the desktop to lay out your work items (files, folders, etc.). All the programs that are running actively, as mentioned above, are using RAM memory to run in. The more you have, the better. For a computer running Windows XP it's nice to have 1G (a gigabyte, which is 1,000 megabytes), but 512M is OK too- 256M is really not enough even though Microsoft says it is.


How fast is the processor?

The speediness of a computer depends heavily on the power and speed of the processor chip, or CPU (Central Processing Unit). This is a choice that is made when buying the computer. The processor is not usually or easily upgraded. So whatever the computer has for a processor, you are pretty much stuck with it. However, even an economy priced CPU is not usually to blame for slowness, but rather the overloading of it with too many demands. Most processors of recent vintage run over 1 or 2 GHz (GHz = gigaherz - the measurement unit of processor speed). The advice is not to try to save money on a low-end CPU, but to buy the fastest and most robust processor you can afford at the time.