5 Common Reasons for Your PC Slowdown

If you noticed that when you trying to work faster on your computer and you always get a white screen when you click Windows Explorer or your mouse freeze for a moment before it went crazy, you know that your PC is having a slowdown. Here are 5 common reasons for your PC slowdown.

1. Your computer has not been rebooted for a long time 

When you leave your computer on without rebooting for a long time, you might feel like your computer is sluggish and slow, and even freeze. This was caused by a number of things, but the primary reason is that your RAM is loaded up with a bunch of stuff which sometimes is not properly purged. Think of it like you haven’t slept for 48 hours or 72 hours. How does it feel? I’m sure you felt sluggish, disoriented and uncoordinated. The same goes to computers. 
Recommendation: Try shutting down your computer every time you are done or at least rebooting your computer once in a while and you should be able to see the difference.  

2. Disk corruption or fragmented hard disk

One of the many causes of disk corruptions are improper shutdown or in the case of external hard drive is improperly dismounted. Other causes are virus infections and hard disk overheated. 
In the case of disk fragmented, think of it like walking into unfamiliar NTUC or Giant with a long shopping list and the layout is disorganized. Some foods products are in between toys rack and detergent. Do you think that you will finish your shopping list faster or slower? I would imagine that it would take a longer time to finish. The same goes to hard disk. With the bits of data scattered around the whole disk, it will take longer time for it to read or write a data since it need to look all over place and remember that each disk has only one spindle. So, it can only read or write one at a time. 
Recommendation: Defrag your computer once in a while and check for bad sectors. Do take note that if you are using SSD hard disk, there is no need to defrag your hard disk

3. Low available memory (RAM)

This is straight forward. Year after year, programs are becoming much better and more complex thus the resource it requires will increase. If you have a 2 years old computer, definitely you will have more software or programs than what you have a year before. In the year 2010, 1GB RAM is a standard and can run fairly decent but in 2014, 4GB is becoming more standard now. So, if you have more software programs running in your computers and your computer memory is choked often, please upgrade your RAM.
Recommendation: upgrade or add more RAM

4. Too much paging

Paging is a technique used by the operating system to store and retrieves data from secondary storage (in this case it’s your hard disk) to be use in main memory. When you start a program, the program will be loaded into the computer memory and part of the program will be stored as pages in the Page files which stored in your local hard disk. This to ensure that the memory is not overloaded and run as efficient as it can since some part of program will not be used all the time. Too much paging happens when available memory is low and your computer requires more memory to run your programs. Since it has little space in the memory, it will turn to page file more, causing your computer to slow down. This was due to the fact that the page file is access like a normal disk operation which is limited by the one spindle on the hard disk.
Recommendation: upgrade or add more RAM or change to a faster hard disk.

5. Infected by malware or virus(es)

Some virus caused your PC slowdown since it tries a bunch of things such as creating multiple copies of itself, sending a high amount of traffic to other machine as part of DDoS attacks or some might use your computer as an email server to send out spams email. You will notice that sometimes your CPU usage spike up but you were not sure what cause it to happen. Try updating your antivirus and run a manual scan. Try to scan your computer for rootkit and malware as well.
Recommendation: Make sure that your computer is installed with latest Microsoft updates and installed with antivirus. 

If you implement all those recommendations but your desktop / laptop is still slow, look for a professional computer repair service to look into the deeper cause of the problem