Why your computer might be slow.
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com.
Some time ago, a friend came to me with a scenario where
his computer had suddenly gotten quite slow.
What I want to do in this video, and the companion article on which this
video is based, is walk you through some of the big components that contribute
to computer slowness, because they are the steps that I walked
through to try and identify exactly what had happened to my friend's machine.
And hopefully provide you a little bit of structure that allows you to diagnose
on your own, perhaps some of the causes of slowness on your own machine.
Now, the scenario that my friend had was that on his Windows 10 machine it had
become I'll just call it almost unbearably slow.
He called earlier, indicating that there
had been a problem, and he clicked some kind of a pop up
message to call this number that could not be dismissed, followed by a miss click
of some sort on Microsoft Edge, at which point the disk light started
flickering continuously and his system came to a crawl.
Now there's a fair amount of data in that description,
and the best way I decided to examine what was going on in his system was to walk
through what I consider to be the big four.
The four big components of computer speed.
Some of them you'll recognize, some of them might surprise you,
but they're all things that are within your grasp to at least be able to take
a look at and diagnose and see if maybe they're contributing to your problem.
We'll see exactly what it was in my friend's case.
By the time we get to the end, there are four basic components to computer speed.
The speed of your CPU, the speed of your disk,
the speed of your Internet, and the amount of Ram you have in your system.
Let's look at each one of those in sequence.
CPU is what everybody looks at or thinks of almost immediately when
their computer is slow.
Therefore, the CPU must be overworked.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes the CPU is so busy working
on something that it doesn't have time for something else and that something else
might even be responding to the keyboard or displaying something on the screen.
Your computer might be working so hard
performing a calculation that it just doesn't have any time left over.
The best way to understand if this is
the problem is to fire up task manager, and if you fire up Task manager,
you will be able to see exactly what percentage of your CPU is in use.
Now, this example on the screen is a screenshot of Task manager
I made of a system that's running okay,
and you'll see that the CPU is 0% used, which means that it's doing nothing.
It's idling it's twiddling its thumbs.
If we were to take a look at another
display or another way that we can examine CPU usage, it might show us
that the system idle process is 99% of the CPU is worse.
The CPU is spending 99% of its time. That's okay.
The CPU is not the cause of your problem here.
On the other hand, you can click on the header.
You can click on the phrase or the word CPU at the top of that column,
and it'll sort that column by the CPU usage with the most CPU usage at the top.
If it doesn't give you the most
at the top, click on the header again to reverse the sort order.
But one way or another,
you will eventually get the program that is running the most that is using
the most CPU displayed at the top of the list.
That could explain your problem.
If you suddenly find that I don't know, Excel is at the top of the list,
then it may be that Excel is performing a calculation and using most of your CPU.
If you're running a video encoding
software as I do from time to time, you may find that the Encoder is using
most of the CPU and it's behind whatever is causing your system to be slow,
and eventually, when it completes its work, your system will return to normal.
That's how you find out if it's a CPU based problem
disk.
This is as I like to call it, the storage that sticks around.
This is where your software writes information that is kept
across your system being shut down and turned back on again.
It's where your files are stored.
It's where your documents are stored.
It's where Windows itself is stored.
There are a number of things that can cause disk usage to go way up.
The one I'm going to focus on first is
simply an application that is doing a lot of disk writing.
It might be that your video encoder or your spreadsheet or whatever other
software you're running is doing something that is very disk intensive.
Now your disk is going to be slower than your CPU, which means that
most of the time if your computer is spending most of its time reading
and writing to disk the rest of the time, it's just going to be waiting.
It's going to be waiting for the disk operation to finish.
But if one of the things you're also trying to do is also writing to that disk,
say that you are saving a document while your video encoder is encoding a video
and using the disk heavily, then yeah, it's going to seem like your system is
slow because it's going to take a long time for your document to be written
longer, perhaps than normal because all of this other disk activity is going on.
Once again, we return to Task manager and we can again click on the column
header for the disk column, and that will show you in megabytes per second.
Who's writing to the disk now it won't
necessarily tell you if this is the cause for your slowdown.
But if while you are experiencing
a slowdown, you come back to this and it's consistently one program or another.
Now it'll tell you something that may tell you that it's that program that is
responsible for the slowness you're experiencing.
In the example screen capture I've got right here.
You'll see it's anti malware service executable.
That's super common when you first fire up your machine or when you download
something for the first time, you may encounter
Windows Defender scanning your system for malware in the files that you just
downloaded or in your system that can cause the disk to be used very heavily.
Similarly, the content indexing service
can also cause your system to slow down unexpectedly.
Now, a third reason for perceived slowness is your Internet connection.
A lot of times what people consider to be
a slow machine is really nothing more than in some ways, their own impatience.
The fact is, it doesn't really matter how
fast your computer is, CPU, disk, Ram or anything.
If it's all just waiting for data to come down your Internet connection.
If you've got a slow connection
to the Internet and what you're doing is primarily online,
then it can seem slow, but there's nothing about your machine involved.
It's simply the speed at which the data is
able to be transferred across the wire from the Internet to you.
Now, that seems fairly simple.
If you've got a slow Internet connection,
then yeah, internet activity is going to be slow.
But what if you've got a fast Internet connection and it's still slow?
Well, one of the things to realize is that the Internet connection to your home
is shared with all the devices that happen to use the Internet.
Now, in years past,
that may have been just a couple of computers, and you've kind of got
a sense for what's happening on each of those machines.
But on the other hand,
especially now with so many Internet of things devices and mobile phones
that use WiFi and all these other devices in our home?
In my home, I've got something like 30 or
35 different devices all connected to the Internet at the same time.
If any one of those or a couple of those
start to do something online, something big online,
like a large download or an update, then yeah, that can impact the speed or
the perceived speed of the Internet connection on all the other devices.
In other words, on your device.
So that's something to at least consider going back to Task Manager.
We can at least have a look to see if there is one specific program on your
machine that happens to be using a lot of the Internet right now.
Same thing in Task Manager, click on the network column heading,
and you can sort by the amount of data that's being transferred across
the Internet across the network for the application involved.
When I see this, the example I've got here shows nobody using the Internet.
In reality, they're using a very tiny, tiny bit.
When I see high network usage, in my case, it's usually Dropbox.
It's usually one of the cloud service
providers synchronizing files that either I've updated that are being uploaded or
that somebody else has updated and is being downloaded to my system.
Those are common
reasons for high Internet usage that you may not be directly responsible
for yourself by the application you happen to be running.
Now another one, this one that actually manifests more as a disk speed issue.
But in reality it's the amount of Ram you have in your system.
So Windows tries really hard. It does.
It tries really hard to make things work, even when you try to exceed its capacity.
By that. I mean, if you run enough software
that wants to use more Ram than you actually have, Windows uses what's called
virtual memory that is memory that is written to disk or read from disk as
needed to make room for all these other requests, depending on what you're doing.
If you're doing a lot of things that require a lot of Ram
that can slow down your system because all of that writing to or reading from your
hard disk, also known as Paging, can really slow down your system.
Your system.
The software you're running is used to working with Ram,
and as far as it's concerned, it still is working with real Ram.
It's very fast, but under the hood, the system is having to compensate
for the lack of Ram by reading and writing things to disk.
Now, one of the ways to look at this is
again in Task Manager sort by the memory column and see how much Ram is being used
by your system by the software on your system.
If you find that it aggregates to more of the Ram than you actually have on your
system, or if you find that there's one application that's using an excessive
amount of Ram at that particular time, that might give you a clue as to what is
or isn't actually causing the system to slow down.
But again, this typically will manifest as a disk issue.
You'll probably see the disk light flashing more or less continuously if you
have one of those, and yet it may not be disk activity on your part.
It may be the system compensating for a lack of Ram.
So what happened to my friend?
Because I went through all of these steps and it was inconclusive.
There was nothing that really stuck out.
Now I never did see the pop up that he described that had this call this number.
It's a typical scam.
Never call the number, by the way, but I wasn't sure exactly what it was he saw.
Normally, he uses Chrome, and in his frustration with the error
message, he clicked on Edge, so I clicked on Edge.
Edge started and started again and again and again and again.
Within a few minutes, the taskbar
was filling up with more and more instances of Edge.
Now each copy of Edge uses a little bit more Ram
until eventually you're using more Ram than you actually have.
The system started thrashing.
It started paging like crazy.
It slowed to a crawl because
too many copies of Edge were running.
It's like running too much software.
Too much Ram was being requested of the system.
It was swapping things to and from disk.
It was getting more and more requests.
It was reading and writing more and more to disks.
It just slowed to a crawl.
We had our culprit.
It was Ram related, and it was because Edge had gotten itself
into this loop of starting over and over and over again.
The fix was to basically stop kill all
those instances of Edge so that I could finally get to one and what I ended up
doing was resetting the home page setting for Edge.
This is an older version of Edge prior
to the Chromium update, but the issue here was simply
that something had corrupted the homepage setting for Edge.
It could have been malware.
It could have been something else we really don't know, but actually changing
Edge to go to a known start page rather than whatever the heck it was doing
stopped it from trying to start over and over and over again.
What's interesting about this scenario is
that it came to light because of a misclick on this message that came up.
It's very likely that Edge had been broken
for a long time, certainly before this particular scenario happened.
Since he never used Edge, he never encountered the problem.
It was only this misclick that he happened
to click on Edge that caused that to come to light.
And because that happened at the same time as this other scare message,
it seemed like they were related when in fact, they weren't.
That's my hypothesis anyway, that's just a guess.
There's no way to know for real exactly what happened.
In hindsight,
the real takeaway here is that when your
system slows down, there are a number of things to look at.
Hopefully you can do so now with a little bit of methodology.
Cpu, then disk, then Internet, then Ram, and sort of see what it is that's using
resources on your system, sometimes not always.
But sometimes a culprit will become very
clear when that happens, that'll give you the clue you need to do
whatever it is that needs to be done, be it stop running the software or try not
to use the Internet everybody at the same time.
Or stop Edge from starting over and over again.
Whatever you may end up with a clue that will allow you to resolve the problem.
Even if you can't resolve the problem,
that clue can then provide valuable data as the diagnosis proceeds to help you
understand exactly why the system is slowing down.
I hope that helps I hope that gives you some direction for updating rates.
For related links for comments and more, visit
askleo.com/2951 I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is Ask Leo.com