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- January 29th, 2014
When you use a computer every day, you get a feel for its abilities, rhythms, and idiosyncrasies. So it always comes as a bit of a surprise when—after months or years of use—the device that previously zipped along like a puppy on speed seems to have slowed, now a geriatric hound no longer interested in chasing the ball.
There are a lot of reasons this happens. After all, when you start the computer the first time, it doesn't have much to do but boot up and glow at you. The minute you install some software, you've started the slowdown process. You fill the hard drive and use more precious RAM until the eventual corruption of the operating system, especially in the Windows registry, where all the instructions and settings used by everything on the computer are stored.
Of course, there are other reasons computers slow down; it could be simply trying to run too many programs at startup. Malware is also a big problem, so be sure you have the best antivirus solutions on hand. You may also have massive downloads happening on your system (or elsewhere on a network) that slows things to a crawl. Be aware of network usage of things like BitTorrent or streaming video.
It's also possible your old hardware simply isn't up to snuff when the time comes to running the latest software. The occasional full reinstallation of the OS might fix the issue, but there's a reason people upgrade things like RAM, hard drives, and entire computers every few years: new software gets better and better partly because it's written to work with the latest and greatest components.
We've focused here on PC slowdowns that you can fix. Most of these are problems for Windows users, but we found a couple of helpers for Mac OS X users, too. There are lots of great paid utilities out there, but don't forego the free utilities galore that help you clean up and speed up the computer. Regular system maintenance will go a long way to eking out many more years of use from your PC, so check out your options in the next few pages.
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