Have A Slow PC?

 

Have you made any recent changes?

If you have installed any recent new hardware such as a printer or graphics card or any applications then try uninstalling these first. It may be conflicting with something else or is not compatible with your existing machine. Always make sure that your computer meets the minimum requirements of new hardware or applications.

Overheating Processor

Processors generate heat, lots of it too and therefore some method of cooling is needed such as a fan. If the temperature of the processor is too high your computer can slow down and act erratically. The main causes of overheating are:

&bull Build up of dust in the fan
&bull Fan motor failure

If the fan is covered with dust then blow it away using compressed air..DO NOT use a hoover as this can cause more problems. If the fan doesn't spin after this the motor may have blown. Replace the fan.

Disk Fragmentation

When files are added, changed and/or removed the files can become spread across different sectors of the disk. This is known as fragmentation. This can significantly slow down your computer as the disk drive has to work harder to find all fragments of a file.
Run a system de-frag, there is a built in utility to do this but third party applications are available for older versions such as NT.

Scan for Viruses

Viruses can cause all sorts of problems on a computer, slow speed is a symptom of the virus using your computers resources to perform nasty tasks. Make sure you scan your computer with reputable anti-virus software and remove whatever virus is found. Ironically, the scan itself can slow your machine down so just have a quick check to see if your anti-virus software is performing a scan in the background. I'd also recommend to automate the scan on a weekly basis.

Memory

Make sure your computer's RAM is adequate enough for what your computer is actually used for, it may be that it needs more memory to cope with intensive applications or your RAM is failing. Add another stick of RAM, making sure it is of the correct type.

Windows Services

Sometimes Windows can get bogged down and grind to a halt by the amount of services that are running in the background, disabling any unnecessary services can improve the speed of your computer but before I show you how, make sure you have backed up your computer and you KNOW which services you do not need running.

To enter the service manager go to:

• Start > Run and type services.msc and press enter

• Double click the service you want to manipulate and select either Automatic -Manual or Disabled from the Startup Type

If you are not certain about a particular service, leave it or set it to manual, this way you can re-enable it and not damage your computer. You can find a list of unneeded services on google, just search for windows unneeded services

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