Slow system

Slow system

There are many factors that can contribute to a slow system.

Hardware; the speed of your hardware is the most important factor
Software; the programs you have that startup with Windows.

Let’s address the first, the speed of your system is determined by the CPU speed, the speed of the main board, the amount of RAM memory and the speed of your hard disk drive. The speed of the CPU is set in manufacturing and cannot be changed short of replacing it with a faster one, however some main boards will not accept a faster CPU. If you have a 400 MHz. CPU, you cannot expect it to perform like a 1 GHz. System by cleaning out your files or adding memory. Next, adding memory will not speed up your machine unless it was already too slow due to the number of programs that are running. If there is not enough memory the system will use the hard disk drive to store information and retrieve it when it needs it, this is a very slow way of holding info for use and is referred to as drive swap or swap file. Adding memory can help keep info loaded in RAM memory which is much faster when retrieving info. However if your system doesn’t hold info on the hard disk when it is in use, adding memory won’t speed up your system. Also the more programs you have running in memory will affect the performance of your system, the more you have running, the slower it gets, the less programs running in memory the better it can achieve max performance. The size of running programs can also have an influence on performance. This brings us to the second part, when Windows starts up there are programs that automatically load up in memory, reducing the number of startup programs can help your system achieve better performance. For example, if you have an anti virus program with lots of features it will load up on start and consume sometimes as much as 20 – 30% of your system resources, then when your program reminders load up it takes more, then when all those little things in the lower right corner (systray) load up, they to consume system resources. Cleaning out your hard disk drive of old files will not help unless you are running out of hard disk space, say around 2 or 3 % drive space free.

So if your system is running slow, the best thing to do is to stop large programs from loading up when you start Windows, perform regular maintenance on your system and avoid running too many programs at once. Ultimately if this doesn’t help, consider getting a new system that will handle everything you want to run.

For additional information, contact your computer service provider.

2006

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