Why is my blankety computer so blankety slow??

Your computer is too slow. You can remember that it used to be faster, but now it is slow. It's frustrating. It's annoying. It's starting to really tick you off..

OK. This isn't a simple subject, but sometimes there are simple things you can do to fix a slow computer. One of the simplest, though certainly not the least expensive, is to just give up and go buy a new one. If your computer is old (and "old" for computers isn't a lot of years) that really might be your best choice. But let's see if there are some less drastic choices before that. 

Bad advice

Most of what you will find on the Internet about speeding up your computer is bad advice. It's often somebody trying to sell you some useless piece of software.

In other cases, the advice is silly. Yes, technically it could speed things up, but it is of such small benefit that you would never notice it and it takes away important functionality at the same time.

I'm not trying to sell you anything here. If there are offers that appear here for registry cleaners, defraggers and the like, I suggest you just ignore them. The suggestions that I'll make don't cost anything and won't harm your computer.

More RAM

RAM is internal memory. It's not disk space. If you are running Windows, it's very easy to check how much RAM you have. Go to "My Computer", click on "Help", and then select "About Windows". A window will pop up telling you a bunch of stuff you won't care about, but it will also tell you "Physical Memory available to Windows". That's how much RAM you have.

It will show that in kilobytes. For example, it might say you have 523,828 KB available. I hope not, because that's not enough. If I were talking to another computer geek, I'd say your system has "512 meg" or "half a gig". We'd agree that is not enough nowadays - a computer with only that much RAM is likely to be slow. This page gives recommendations for how much RAM you might need nowadays.

This doesn't make sense, does it? Your computer RAM hasn't changed, if it was fast when you bought it, why would you need more now?

Because the world has changed. The biggest change is the amount of pictures and movies on the web. Not only is there more and more of that, but they are becoming higher resolution. More graphics, more detail, more RAM needed.

Your operating system has become larger. Every security patch and enhancement you have downloaded and installed usually requires a little more RAM. Over years, it adds up. The same us true for every program you use; when features are added, they almost always need more RAM.

If you use Windows, you almost certainly run antivirus and spamware programs, and they get bigger and more complicated every time they update.

Fortunately, RAM isn't horribly expensive and if you are just a little bit adventurous, you can probably buy it and install it yourself. It's not hard. You can buy RAM on-line and the places that sell it often will give you a lot of installation advice - sometimes even movies that show you exactly what to do.

Unfortunately, all computers are limited as to how much RAM they can use and older computers sometimes just can't use what you really need. Those same on-line places can tell you how much RAM your computer can take - sometimes just by downloading a little program that figures that out for you.

Temporary Internet Files

This is only for browsing, but as that's a large part of computer use today, cleaning these out regularly can help. How to do that is browser dependent and I have seen people who think they only need to clean out cookies (actually, you probably don't need to clean out those), so you should probably Google or look in "Help" to learn how to do this for your browser.

Viruses and other junk

Your computer might be slow because it is infected.

I know, you run A/V software and you don't visit porn sites. You don't even open attachments in email. You practice safe computing. Fine, but you still could be infected.

You aren't going to like this, and there are people who will disagree, but the only absolute way to clean your computer of viruses and malware is to wipe everything out and reinstall the operating system from scratch. Even Microsoft admits that. Yes, much if this junk CAN be removed without resorting to that. But the very worst of it, the very best crafted stuff, can hide itself completely. Those are not common, but they do exist. If you want to be certain, wipe and install is what you need to do.

If your installed A/V can't fix your problem and you can't stomach the pain of a fresh start, there are some excellent sites that can help. I particularly like Bleeping Computer.


Disk space and defragmentation

Insufficient disk space is a definite speed killer; fortunately disk space is cheap today. Replacing your system drive is best left to someone with experience, but adding an external second drive is as simple as plugging it in and deciding what to move to it.

You'll see a lot of people recommending defragging your disk. There are unusual circumstances where that could help some people, but for most it's a waste of time. No harm in trying, though - just don't be surprised if nothing changes.

Dust

Heat from dust build-up is often overlooked but is a common source of slowness, especially in laptops. The reason is that modern cpus are designed to slow themselves down if they get too hot, and dust makes it harder to lose heat. Getting at the inside of the smallest machines can be challenging.

If you happen to own a compressor, don't use it to blow out your computer unless it is oil free.

I had a customer who owned a metal working shop do that. He effectively coated the inside of his machine with tiny chips of oily metal. It didn't run for very long after that.

Registry Cleaners

This stuff is hokum. Don't waste your money. If they did work, it would be because they disabled some virus or malware. You have other software for that. So called "unused entries" would only slow down the most ancient, underpowered systems.

Indexing

Windows XP has this in Services but it's in Control Panel/System and Maintenance/Indexing Options on Vista and Windows 7. Indexing builds a database that can speed up finding files when you go searching for them. But it also slows down your machine when it updates that index, which it has to do if you add new files and for that reason, many people shut it off, figuring that they won't search very often and would rather have more speed now.

If you get a speed up from disabling this, your machine is probably very old and underpowered.

I have seen Google's Desktop Indexer slow things down considerably even on decent hardware. I tend to remove that wherever I see it.

Paging Files

Almost every operating system uses a page or swap file to store things when it runs out of RAM. The only ones that do not run on things like mobile phones or Apple's iPad.

Using that file takes time and slows you down, so it would be better to have more RAM if you can: the more RAM you have, the less you'll use that file. In theory, if you have enough RAM, you don't even need a pagefile at all.

If you have two hard drives (two real hard drives, not just a C: and a D: on one physical drive), you can improve performance by putting the pagefile on the less active drive. That makes sense; but we are talking very minor improvement in most situations.

How big should the pagefile be?

You'll see recommendations to make the pagefile 1.5 times installed RAM . That's reasonable, but not good for very small amounts of RAM or very large amounts. Let!s say you only had 64MB of RAM. With a 96MB page file, you'd have 160MB of total available space to run programs. That's not much - a larger pagefile would let you do more work, but still very slowly.

On the other hand, if you have boatloads of RAM, there's never any need to swap anything out. So in theory, you need no swapfile at all.

Generally, you can let Windows tell you what it thinks the minimum size is and go with that.

Does having too big a pagefile hurt? In a perfect world, no, it wouldn't matter. However, some stupidly designed programs will keep requesting more and more RAM until the OS says "No". If you have 512MB of RAM and a big 4GB pagefile, those programs could eat up the pagefile and they'll slow themselves and everything else to a crawl.

With the new 64 bit machines, you can have a LOT of RAM. Note that one of the first things that Microsoft says about 64 bit systems is this:

"When lots of memory is added to a computer, a paging file may not be required."

Do you you have a 32 bit or 64 bit machine? For Vista and Windows 7, do Start -> Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> System. Look for the line that says "System type". For XP, click Start -> Run and type sysdm.cpl. If it says "64 bit", that's what you have, otherwise it's 32 bit. If it is 64 bit, you should be able to put in a LOT of RAM.

TCP tweaking

In the days of dial up modems and slower DSL, tweaking TCP/IP settings could help speed things up. With today's faster connections, these tweaks usually won't help. Talk to your Internet provider; they will know what is best for your circumstances.

Wrapup

That's about it. If you search the web, you'll find registry hacks and other obscure tweaks. Almost all of them are worthless, highly specialized or will provide only insignificant gains. For most of us, a waste of time.

Some links you may find helpful:

How to Minimize Startup Time for Windows?

This talks about removing startup programs to speed startup time, but those programs also use up ram and steal at least some cpu, so are worth examining.

Can I get rid of spyware with a system restore?

Discusses using restore points in Windows

Windows Performance Boosts

A more detailed article I wrote on this subject.

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