Why is my PC slow?

There a number of reason why your PC may have slowed down. It's highly frustrating when your PC is slowed down to a slow crawl, when once it was a fast machine. If you are still using the original software there seems to be no good reason why your PC has slowed down, after all the computer is still running at the same speed.

Your Hard drive could need de fragging.

A common problem with old PC's it the hard drive gets fragmented. Basically when the operating system adds new data is puts it at the end of the hard drives space, when it deletes something it deletes is from the middle of the hard drive. As a result over time all the data on the hard drive is scattered around with big gaps in between. When you defrag the hard drive, is takes all this data and tidies it up, making it easier for the PC to find the data. It's easier finding stuff when everything is neat and tidy rather that scattered everywhere.

You could have run out of RAM.

If you press Control, Alt and Delete simultaneously, then go to the task manager. Look at the bottom right hand corner, at the commit charge. This is an indication of how much RAM is being used, it'll be something like 702M/2460M. This mean 702Mb is being used. If the first number is more than half of the second then it means that the computer is having to use the hard drive to supplement the RAM. You either need to close some programs, or put some more RAM in your machine. If this first number is too big then your machine will be running really slowly.

You could have a spyware problem.

Spyware is a major problem with modern PCs that are permenently connected to the internet. Spyware is little bits of software that install themselves on your PC robbing your system resources whilst either serving you with irritating pop up ads, or worse they could be sending all your keystrokes and personal data to some other PC across the world. There are a number of good spyware removal softwares that can eliminate most of this problem.

 

There could be registry problems.

The registry is the central nervous system, of the PC. It is quite easy for this to get errors, problems in registry can cause the PC to slow down. Again there are a number of good registry cleaners that will search through the registry identify these errors and correct them. This can really speed up your PC.