The number one reason your Computer is slow.
Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com.
Probably the number one complaint I get from people that have had their computers
for any length of of time is that it seems slow, or that it's gotten slower over
time, or that it just takes too long to boot, or you get the idea, right?
It's all related to how fast their machine
is or isn't compared to their expectations.
So when I say what the number one reason
is, well, it's not always the number one, but 99% of the time it absolutely is.
And it's very simple.
There's too many programs running on the machine.
Remember that when you run multiple
programs, they're all competing for the resources, they're all competing
for the disk, for the CPU, for your Ram or whatever.
The more of that that's going on, the more time the operating system has
to spend dealing with that, the slower things become.
And the more things that are taking away
CPU resources or disk resources because they have to do something,
the less there is available for the programs that you probably want to run.
So how does that happen?
Why does that happen?
Well, a couple of things.
First off, installing software shouldn't hurt.
By that I mean it should be honestly perfectly benign to install software
and then realize or understand that it only runs when you run it.
It only works when you ask it to do something.
Unfortunately, that's rarely the case these days.
So many different programs actually
install additional software besides their main program that runs automatically when
you start your computer or when you sign into Windows.
These are utilities that sometimes they're designed to make things load faster later.
More often than not, they're things that periodically check for updates.
Sometimes they are the pieces of software
that you actually want to have running all the time, like, say, dropbox.
In order for it to do its job, it needs to be running all the time.
But you don't necessarily need for things to be having a dedicated piece of software
running all the time to check for updates, for example.
That's something that the program itself can do the next time you run it.
Many do, some don't.
And those often install software on your machine that even
if you never use their application, are now impacting your performance because
they've got something running all the time.
So what do you do about all this?
How do you get your machine to run faster?
Well, here's a five point plan.
One don't install software you don't need.
I'm amazed at the number of times I've run
across people's machines that have just a ton of software installed and a ton
of software that's running all the time, even though they never,
ever actually use the applications that they originally installed way back when.
Don't just don't install software you
don't believe you're actually going to use.
I understand testing it, don't get me wrong,
sometimes you need to do this, but if you're not sure, avoid it to begin with.
That avoids the entire problem from the get go.
Second, okay, great.
You've decided this isn't the software you
want to use or it's software that a year later you realize I've never used.
That uninstall it uninstall software that you don't use.
The issue here is that when you run an uninstaller, it should
also uninstall those components that are running all the time.
Besides freeing up disk space, you're now going to free up more of your
system's resources to actually be available for the software you do use.
Three.
Turn off auto start options.
Now this is for the software that you've
elected to keep for various reasons, and that's fine.
But many of them have options in their settings or preferences or elsewhere
that say start with Windows or Start on Login, or Start Automatically.
Uncheck those if they are not things that you actually need to have running
from the moment you log in and you're okay starting up those applications manually
when you need them, don't have them start up automatically, there's no reason all
they're doing is slowing your machine down.
Now, one thing I will suggest you do is
review what's in the notification area of your taskbar.
That's step number four.
That's the area that is in the lower right hand corner of your Windows taskbar.
It often has a lot of different icons for things that are running on your
machine that you might not realize are running on your machine.
Each one of those icons represents a running program.
Now some of them you're going to want,
like Windows Defender needs to be there all the time, or your sound controller
needs to be there, but a lot of things probably don't.
Unless you are running or chatting with somebody all the time,
or that's like a primary part of your use of your computer, you probably don't need
to have your instant messaging program running all the time.
There's a lot of different things.
Each one of those.
I'm not saying you should turn it off.
I'm not saying you should uninstall it.
I'm saying you should check to make sure it's something you actually use
that should be installed and should be running all the time.
If it's not, well, then you can take steps
to stop that and finally examine what else is auto starting.
That's the Task Manager.
In the startup tab, you'll see a number of things that are
starting automatically when you log into Windows.
Just review them, see if you need them, see if you understand what they do
and whether or not they are something you actually care about or can live without.
The good news here is that within
Windows Task Manager, you can simply disable them.
That way, if you disable something,
you end up deciding you later want to re enable.
You can it's very simple to do.
It's also the case where
in Windows Task Manager, honestly it's very hard to screw things up.
Like I said, the worst that will happen is some feature won't work and you can just
go back in and re enable whatever it is you just disabled.
There is one extreme solution and it used to be really common.
This is the kind of thing that I used
to do every year or two on even my primary machine, and that is back up reformat,
erasing the disk and reinstall Windows from scratch.
Then install only those things you need as you need them.
That by definition gives you the cleanest possible machine from the get go.
Like I said, it used to be very common
for people to do this, mostly because of software instability over time.
Software rot, we used to call it.
Nowadays it's not necessarily the case,
but we're still installing software and that software can slow down
and in some cases affect the stability of your system.
A reformat and reinstall is one way
to ensure that everything is as clean as it possibly can be.
Hope that helps.
Hope that gets you a faster machine in the result.
For updates, for comments, for related links and more, visit askleo.com/125530.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.