My Computer is Really Slooooooow!

You may have heard before, from me or others, about doing periodic maintenance on your computer, including running Disk Cleanup and Defrag. These built-in tools will help speed up your computer and make disk operations more efficient. You may also know that viruses and malware can slow your computer down. So just to be extra careful, you keep you keep your antivirus definitions up to date, and do regular virus and spyware scans. An overly full hard drive makes it hard for your virtual memory to work efficiently. You need disk drive space so that your physical memory can “swap” paging files with the virtual memory set aside on your hard drive. So you clean off some unwanted programs and archive those documents and pictures that you want to save but no longer use frequently.

You have checked all those things, so why is your computer still running slow and sluggishly? Now it may be time to do a little troubleshooting to find out what is slowing down your system. You could have an application causing problems, or it could be a virus or other malware. A recently applied patch could also be causing an application to run improperly. To find out what is going on, you will have to take a look at graphical performance indicators as well as a list of running processes. This is tricky, because even if you see which process is causing your problems, you won’t know if it is good (normal) or bad (caused by a virus) unless you do some additional research and find out what they are. Even I don’t pretend to know what they all are just by looking at them. I spend a lot of time researching processes to find out what they are and how to fix them if they are causing a problem. Troubleshooting computer problems is not always easy – that’s why us computer geeks aren’t worried about job security quite so much :) I have listed some resources below for you, however, so you won’t have to spend so much time researching these things.

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