If adding speed to a computer were only as easy as downloading a program… (Well, in some cases, it is – more later.) As I’ve said before, there are literally an uncountable number of things that can cause your computer to slow down, either temporarily or long-term. There are also a number of things you can do to either speed up or slow down your computer’s performance.

Computer Speed Isn’t Always Relative

Computer speed is sometimes related to what you’re doing at any particular moment. If you’re opening a program or performing some very complex action, your computer may need to devote the bulk of its memory or processing power to that task. That will make the computer seem sluggish or otherwise unresponsive. It’s also possible that your computer is doing something you don’t know about, such as running a program or process in the background. This can temporarily steal performance from your computer, too.

Your computer may be underpowered for the task at hand, or you may be asking it to do too much at once. This kind of performance problem can sometimes be cured by reducing the number of programs running at one time or increasing the amount of memory in your computer.

Many people don’t realize that computers can also be slowed down by the lack of adequate free space on the hard disk. If you don’t have enough free hard disk space, your computer may find it difficult to write to temporary files that some applications need to run properly. This problem can be addressed in a number of ways: first, remove programs and files you no longer need or want. Following a major cleaning, defragment your hard disk using the built in defragmenting tool provided by Microsoft. You’ll find it under the System Tools section.

If you still can’t get the available hard disk space up to at least 25% of the total volume space, consider purchasing an external hard disk to provide additional file storage space. Alternately, if your computer has a writeable CD-ROM or DVD drive, you can move some of your files off to disc in a permanent archive without having to get rid of them. This is a great way to handle video and audio files, as well as photo images that you want to preserve, but that may be robbing your hard disk of precious space.

As I mentioned earlier, you can also recover lost performance by downloading a registry cleaner program such as RegCure. If your hard disk is nowhere near full and you’re still experiencing performance problems, a good registry cleaning may be in order. RegCure does a wonderful job of locating and eliminating abandoned code that may be clogging up your registry and causing computer performance problems.

Photo Credit: Luis Argerich, via Flickr

In my last post, I discussed the possibility that overheating can be a cause of slow computer performance. While overheating of the processor can and does happen, (and it can be catastrophic when it does occur), it’s not the most likely cause of poor performance. I wouldn’t consider it among my chief suspects when trying to diagnose a slow computer.

Memory Can Cause Slow Computer Performance

A more likely hardware-based cause of slowness is memory. Computers come with a certain amount of memory installed and often, computer owners find it desirable to upgrade the computer’s complement of memory. Lack of memory is much more likely to be a cause of slow computer performance than overheating is, and it is one of my chief suspects when troubleshooting poor performance. Lack of available memory can be a temporary problem – as when there are simply too many applications open simultaneously or when something is consuming more memory than it should. Memory problems can also be “structural.” That is, the computer simply doesn’t have enough memory to run the operating system and the applications the user needs.

In this case, the computer tries to compensate for lack of RAM by using disk space to “swap” information in and out of memory. It amounts to a juggling act and the computer’s performance can slow measurably when swapping or “paging” occurs. The performance is especially poor when the computer is asked to run memory-intensive programs or facilitate real-time functions like online gaming.

Whatever version of Windows you have loaded will come with a recommendation that the computer have a minimum amount of RAM installed. Most computer users don’t understand that this “minimum” is absent any RAM for the applications! In other words, Microsoft’s recommendations for memory apply just to its operating system. Additional memory will be needed for the applications.

When it comes to poor performance, users often find relief when they “max out” the amount of installed memory. Each computer has a limit as to how much memory it can work with. The manufacturer’s recommendation for maximum memory should not be exceeded. The computer can’t use more than its maximum memory, so exceeding the manufacturer’s recommendations on RAM is simply throwing good money away.

Second, it’s important to stick with the type of memory the manufacturer recommends. Some computers are more tolerant of memory that doesn’t meet the manufacturer’s recommendations, but some computers simply can’t deal with a mismatch. In this case, the computer performance will suffer – if the computer works at all.

My recommendation: upgrade your memory according to the manufacturer’s specs and put in as much RAM as you can afford.

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Sometimes, computers slow down gradually over a long period of time. The decline in performance may be so gradual that you simply don’t notice that it’s happening. In other cases, your computer comes to a screeching halt – stopped dead in its tracks by ominous warnings or the famed “blue screen of death.”

Admitting You Have A “Slow” Problem

What should you do when you can no longer deny that your computer is having a problem? If you’re not a PC technician, or at least good friends with one, and you don’t have a lot of cash to spare, join the club! There are a few things you can do to troubleshoot the immediate problem, and even attempt to cure it before things go from bad to worse for your trusted binary-loving friend.

If you’re dealing with a slow computer that’s still operational and able to boot relatively normally, your computer is in a condition you can work with. Check your computer to see what’s running on it. If you’re the kind of person who loads everything into memory when you start the computer, your poor performance may be related to the fact that your computer may not have enough memory to load the operating system properly.

Use the Task Manager to see what’s running on your computer. Better still, restart the computer and without manually opening any applications, open the Task Manager to see what’s loaded. If you find that you have many applications and utilities loading at startup, you’ll want to pare these back to see if you can get a performance upgrade.

Speaking of performance, Windows comes with a built-in performance monitor. You can see graphically what your computer is doing and get other real-time performance statistics on your setup. Performance Monitor (perfmon) is part of the system tools in Windows Vista. Simply fire it up and Performance Monitor will begin tracking your computer. You should see CPU activity rise and fall with everything you do on the computer. You may discover that one particular application is misbehaving, or is at least hogging computer resources. Uninstalling and reinstalling a fresh copy of the cranky app may solve your problem.

Apart from what the Performance Monitor can tell you, the computer registry may require a bit of maintenance. If you aren’t a computer professional, mucking around in the registry probably isn’t recommended, but you can use a registry cleaner like RegCure to remove abandoned and unneeded bits of code that are clogging up your registry and degrading your computer performance. RegCure is one of the most trusted names in registry cleaners and has been installed millions of times worldwide.

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Problems arise in computers all the time. Some problems need to be fixed immediately because they impact the way the computer operates. Other problems tend to “accumulate” over time and may not even be noticeable at first. When you finally decide that you do have a problem, the solution may not be apparent because you can’t say exactly when the problem started occurring, much less what exactly is going wrong. So how do you speed up your computer when you’re not sure what the problem is?

Windows Has Some Helpful Tools

Even if you know nothing about a computer aside from the location of the power switch, you can still do some basic troubleshooting to fix your slow computer. If you want to tackle the task of finding out what’s slowing down your PC, you’ll need to make some observations.

Shut your computer down and restart it. Restarting isn’t really a magic bullet, but if something’s gotten corrupted in temporary memory, or a part of the OS isn’t working properly, a hard reset might just do the trick. (Besides, restarting the computer is cheap and easy to do.)

Watch the computer as it starts up to see if you notice anything different about your computer. The computer will do a number of self-tests before it gets to the meat-and-potatoes of the OS. When the OS starts to load, see how long it takes to go from start screen to working computer. If this task seems to take longer than it did in the past, you may have many startup items configured to load into memory each time the computer starts. If this is the case, check the Task Manager (Ctrl+Ald+Delete) to get a handle on what’s running. If you see programs that are not necessary, reconfigure your startup items to exclude the unnecessary items.

Caveat: Don’t disable your anti-virus and anti-malware software.

Run disk cleanup, a free utility that comes with Windows. Disk cleanup will get rid of old bits of code on your hard disk and in your file structure that you no longer need. If you need heavy-duty help with this task, consider using a registry cleaner like RegCure. The registry cleaner isn’t the same thing as disk cleanup, so you can use both products as they’re needed.

Once your hardware is clean, reboot to see if this improves your computer performance.

Photo Credit: Alex Pearson, via Flickr