Name three of the most annoying things in the world; if a slow computer is not on your list, consider yourself very lucky. It's bad enough if your home PC is slow, but if your work computer is slow and encounters freezes, you're in for a serious session of nerve-stretching and unproductiveness. In order to find the magical cure for a PC that's barely crawling, you will need to find out what causes its slowness. Here is a list of the most common causes that lead to slow PCs, along with some easy fixes.
Malware. Malicious software, also known as malware, is one of the most common reasons for a computer's slowness. Viruses, Trojans or spyware have a reputation for bringing even the most powerful computers to their knees, either by messing with sensitive operating system files or by running various tasks in the background. Getting a PC infected is quite simple, as it may only take a single click on a harmful link. Fortunately, the solution to this is also quite simple: keeping an antivirus program running at all times. Even though it's a known fact that antivirus software has a slight impact on a PC's performance itself, it's a small compromise you make to avoid worse scenarios that include a slow PC, data loss and even permanent hardware damage.
Software. Imagine your PC is a copybook and every piece of software you install equals a written page in that copybook. Now compare the amount of time you initially needed to find a piece of information, when only a few pages were written in your copybook, and the amount of time you need to find something in a full copybook. Just in the same manner, when you overcrowd your PC with a lot of software, it may become slower. The fix for this is easy: uninstall everything you don't need. Also, be sure to use a registry cleaner or an uninstall program that will completely wipe every trace of an uninstalled program.
Hardware. Nothing lasts forever, no matter how well you take care of it, so even though your PC might be virus free and carefully maintained, it may eventually have a hard time dealing with some programs. This happens because programs evolve in order to offer users more features and options, thus requiring more processing power, so with every software update you make, you actually bring your PC one step closer to its end.
A temporary solution would be to add more RAM and, if possible, to upgrade the processor. This is a temporary solution, though, because as technology advances, processors and RAM modules will eventually use different sockets and slots, making it impossible to upgrade further without also upgrading your motherboard and pretty much everything else.
Overall, unless you are using an ancient PC that has served its country long enough and is now ready to retire, you are most likely to be able to speed it up a bit using these simple tips and tricks.
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