A friend of mine called complaining her computer was running slower than it used to. Frustrated, she asked if I could look at it and see if there was anything I could do. Having dealt with this exact problem on my own computer I had some ideas as to what to look for.
Check Hard Drive Utilization
If your hard drive is filled near capacity, your computer will run slow. Check the utilization of your hard drive and delete unneeded files. If you keep pictures and videos on your computer, consider buying an external hard drive to store that data to free up room on your computer’s internal storage device.
Remove Unneeded Products
You can’t see them, but there are lots of things happening in the background on your computer even if you’re not actively doing anything. Most of these things are required just for your computer to run. However over time unwanted things likely have been installed on your computer. Many of them will “piggy back” on the installation of something you do want. For example, if you’re not paying attention the installation of the Google Chrome browser will install a host of things that have have nothing to do with Chrome. These extra products that run in the background take up system resources, slowing down the computer’s operations overall. Look through the list of products and applications installed on your computer and remove anything you do not use.
Hardware Requirements
A good computer costs a considerable amount of money, so people expect them to last for years. Over the last few years several versions of the popular Windows operating system have become unsupported Windows 8 went out of support in January 2016, and Windows 8.1 fell by the wayside in early 2018. As these dates approached, users were asked if they wanted to update to Windows 10. Many users noted a considerable slowdown that coincided with updating to Windows 10.
Many reasons may contribute to a computer slowing down. One of the most obvious is the hardware requirements of the newer product. While officially Windows 10 can run with 1 or 2GB of RAM, the general consensus is 4GB is the minimum requirement and 8GB is recommended for smooth performance. If you have an older computer that experienced a considerable performance decrease when updated from Windows 7 or Windows 8 to Windows 10, check how much memory is installed in your computer. If it is 4GB or less, consider upgrading to at least 8GB.
In today’s disposable world, many people just throw things away when they don’t work as well. Instead, one could take the time to fix them, or make small alterations to make them last longer.
How about you EOD Nation, has your computer seemingly slowed down over time? Have you taken any action to try to recover the lost performance?
Swapping a boot HDD out for an SSD is an amazing improvement. My IBM issued W500 had gotten to the point of booting up in 5 minutes. I dropped in an SSD and went down to 1 minute.
That’s a great suggestion, Ray. It’s a little more expensive of a change, and you have to have the know how to move your data over or re-install your system….but it definitely can make a huge difference.