Why Is My Computer Running Slow

Why Is My Computer Running Slow?

Have you ever asked yourself, “why is my computer running slow?” We are all ‘plugged in’ to our computers in this day and age, so we might consider our computers a need versus want. However, people who work at home, such as Medical Transcription / Healthcare Documentation Specialist’s depend on their home computers for income. These people can’t afford any downtime on their technology.

Although computers are very different from us, we can directly relate preventative maintenance in our own lives to the health of our computers. People gain a huge health benefit from practicing preventative maintenance with their health; some people use exercise, others follow healthy eating habits, and some go for regular visits to the doctor for check-ups. For computers to stay running at optimal conditions, they need to be on a preventative maintenance plan too. Below are some of the basics that I would recommend you do on a regular basis.

Clean Your Computer

It’s important to clean your computer both on the outside and on the inside. You have no idea how much havoc dust can cause on hardware – it can fry a circuit. That means remove the cover and get rid of the dirt, dust, and other debris from the cooling fans, power supplies, and other components that show signs of dirt. Try not to touch the components directly, rather, use an air spray or anti-static vacuum. The frequency will vary depending on the environment but I would say monthly to start and either increase or decrease the frequency as needed.

Manage Your Data

I can’t stress this one enough, you must manage your data. External hard drives or online storage is cheap but data recovery is expensive. Typically, you’re looking at over $1,000 to recover data from a 500GB hard drive, and that’s a big maybe.

It might be worth looking into cloud storage as well. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all offer great deals on cloud storage. Although it does cost monthly, Google offers 100 GB of storage for only $3.00 a month. The more storage you need, the more it costs. With that said, buying a terabyte hard drive every two years is expensive. As mentioned above, recovering data off of an old, physical hard drive sucks.

Do Regular Software Updates

This is a tricky one, it is recommended you keep your system with the latest updates but sometimes you can run into issues with hardware and software version compatibility. You find this is most common with video cards. You will have a stable version that works well with all of your software but may cause havoc when you updated to a new version and now some application crashes your system. In some cases, you may have to revert (system restore to a previous point) and you’re fine.

There are many possible reasons for the crashing but generally, it comes down to testing by the developers and the myriad of computer/software configurations that exist – they can’t possibly test them all, so they test the most common configurations. Software updates also address bugs in previous versions and may resolve some of the glitches you might be experiencing. Updates should be conducted weekly (monthly at the latest).

Scanning

Why is my computer running slow? Because you have a virus! Scan your computer for viruses, trojan horses, worms, and spyware. These are programs that you most likely won’t even know are running but will definitely affect your computer’s performance. Some of these programs can be installed just by visiting a website (no need for interaction!) and some can be harmless while others can cripple your system and steal your information.

These scans should be done frequently. It is recommended to do so weekly unless you had a virus recently, then moving that to a daily task until would be good you can confirm the virus is removed. You may need to consult an expert here as removing the virus may be beyond the removal program.

Registry

The registry is like a big atlas for your computer, it’s where all the settings and configuration information is stored. The big issue here is that anything and everything that has ever been installed goes into the registry and can affect system performance. Even when you remove a program there is always some information that it leaves in the registry – the “I was here” scratched into your system.

This is a less frequent scan and you should be safe with monthly or even quarterly scans.

Hard disk scanning/defragmentation

In the computer world, you’ll most likely have a bunch of files that you’ve added then deleted over time.

It’s a misconception that the hard disk stores data like a CD ROM, it’s not one continuous line of data. It’s like having a book with all the sentences spread out over the entire book; sure, all the content is technically there, but it increases your reading time as you‘d have to go all over the place to actually read anything (your computer just happens to do this super fast).

These additions and deletions eventually cause the hard disk to become fragmented and slows performance. This scan should be done quarterly but also depends on how often you copy, delete, and move files.

Cleaning temporary files

You’d be amazed at how much data you have stored in temporary files. These are files that are downloaded from visiting websites, created by using software programs, orphaned files, updates, system logs, etc. You should do this clean-up fairly frequently, at least monthly.

So  back to the question of, “why is my computer running slow?” There are a lot of tools available to help you get that system working perfectly. Typically a good virus scanner such as Bitdefender, Norton, or Kaspersky will do the scanning and cleaning mentioned above.

There you have it! Good luck, and happy computer cleaning!