Slow Computer? Virus Diagnosis May Not Be Accurate

So Many Problems, So Little Time

In reality, most slow computer complaints aren’t rooted in viral infections. Some viral infections don’t have any noticeable impact on the computer’s overall performance, meaning that a computer can be seriously compromised and not give any outward indications of performance problems. Rootkits are famous for this.

If you want to sneak into someone’s computer and you don’t want them to find out about it, you’d better not do anything or load anything that could potentially tip off the victim that a problem is afoot. By being careful about not taking up too many computer resources, you can have much better access and for a much longer time than you would if you loaded some big, slow resource hog onto the computer, right?

Viruses can indeed slow a computer down, but they’re not the only cause of a slow computer, and they’re often not even the most likely suspect! Computers slow down for a number of reasons – the likeliest being a lack of memory. A computer can do a lot when it has the right amount of memory. If its memory is consumed either by the operating system or by a number of applications that are running simultaneously, or even by a single application that is doing some heavy computation, the computer will definitely slow down.

Beyond memory, other simple problems can cause real performance headaches. Lack of disk space, client-server operations across a network, bad network hardware, runaway processes and similar snags can slow a computer down to a crawl.

Corruptions and abandoned code in the computer registry can also cause a performance hit. Making sure the computer registry is clean and highly functional will do a lot to restore performance on any Windows PC. I recommend SpeedUpMyPC 2011 to handle all of my registry cleaning.

The bottom line is this: if you suspect a viral infection, run a virus scan and clean up anything you find. Make sure your virus definitions are up-to-date and act immediately if you think your computer has been compromised, but don’t automatically assume that your computer performance problems are related to a viral infection. There’s a very good chance that slow computer performance is related to a less dire, easier-to-fix and easy-to-prevent problem!

Photo Credit: CoachDanny, via Flickr

Information Overload

Ironically, as computer processing speeds increase, so do our expectations as to what we want our computers to do. Many computers that are just a year or two old end end up bogging down as we try to utlize the applications of tomorrow with the technology of yesterday. Do you remeber when you were happy just to send some e-mail and maybe look up a recipe for banana bread? Now you want to IM your face book friend while watching a live streaming video from the Food Network.  It seems that no matter how fast we make these machines of ours, we are going to expect them to do more. My suggestion to you people who constantly want to be on the cutting edge is to purchase a brand spanking new computer every six months. I am sure you have money tree somewhere in which you can just pluck off some cashin order to do this.

However, if you do not happen to have one of these trees,and are stuck with having the same old computer for three or four years, there are several things you can do keep your pc running like it just came out of the box such as installing regular software updates, having a good firewall, scheduling regular hard drive cleanings, perfoming a routine registry check, and making sure nothing has been accidently unplugged by your child or pet.

Its whats on  inside

While we all could use a little more DDR Ram in our lives at times, sometimes the solution to making our computers chug along a little faster lies within the programming itself.  Certain applicatons that we download could end up hogging all the memory usage and make everything else run slow.  I like to open the Task Manager up periodically and see what unwanted apps I have running and how much memory they like to take up.  Sometimes doing this is akin to actually looking at the calorie chart at McDonalds. While it is tempting to close down everything but the basics, doing this may cause your operating system to shut down. Shut down the things you know you are not using and then perhaps go into the control panel and remove the ones that you know you are not going to use.

Clash of the Browsers

Sometimes a slow computer is caused by having too many programs wanting to do the same thing. Recently, I had my computer running at snail pace because of the Browser I had ended up downloading from my new ISP.  The friendly guy wanted to do everything for me and just could not stand it if I used someone else. It would pop open on start up and like a hyperactive urchin it would not leave me alone until I paid attention to it. This got old real fast and I was finally forced to remove it.  I have also had the same problem with virus protection programs, which seem to live by the code of the Highlander (there can be only one). These clashing programs can end up slowing your computer down to a crawl as they fight each other for processing and memory usage.

Ghost Programs

Some programs you delete, never seem to go away. Even if you go through all the steps and properly uninstall them via your control panel, entrenched pieces of them remain refusing to leave. This is where having a good registry cleaner can come in handy. These programs are usually good at rooting out these little pieces of code and untangling from the programming mass.