If your computer suddenly slows to an agonizing pace, you may be tempted to think that a virus or other type of malware is the problem. You may race to perform anti-virus scans or malware scans, and start thinking about what you’ve downloaded recently. The good news is that not all computer slowdowns are the result of malware or viruses.

Don’t Jump To Conclusions

When you’re trying to diagnose a slow computer, it’s important NOT to jump to conclusions about what the problem might be. An erroneous diagnosis can produce a great deal of unnecessary work, lost time and rarely gets you to the correct solution.

It’s never a bad idea to scan your computer regularly for viruses and malware. In fact, your anti-virus and anti-malware programs should be set to update themselves automatically, and should also be set to scan your computer frequently. For computers that have a reliable and trusted anti-virus/anti-malware program running on them, a viral infection is rarely my first suspect when a slowdown occurs.

I like to look at the performance of the computer to see if there’s something specific that’s causing the computer to misbehave. I also like to know what’s running at the moment. The Task Manager can give you an instant look at which applications and processes are running. A word of caution: don’t kill a process or application simply because you don’t recognize it by name. Some necessary OS processes have strange names. Take a moment to figure out what’s consuming the CPU’s time. If a process is consuming 100% or nearly 100% of the CPU, you may want to end that particular task, though.

Perfmon is a built-in tool from Microsoft that can provide a detailed graphical look at what your CPU is doing. This is a good troubleshooting tool that can help you pinpoint trouble because you can see the impact of starting and stopping applications instantly. It will also show you the impact of even simple things, like moving the mouse cursor around the screen. Use this tool in conjunction with the Task Manager to pinpoint applications that are misbehaving or that don’t get along with other applications you may have running on your computer.

Once you locate the troubled application(s), check with the software publisher to see if an update to your software has been published. If so, apply it, and any other patches to the OS that you may have missed.

If that doesn’t resolve the issue, consider running a registry cleaner like RegCure to remove registry entries that have been left behind or replaced with newer ones.

Photo Credit: Bunchofpants, via Flickr

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