Processor: the processor is the "90% of your computer," the actually guts and wonders of the machine. It is a relatively small device that represents 1,000's of years of technological progress. In spite of that history, the effective life span of a processor is not great. Not because it wears out (they don't really, unless they over heat) but because the demands of software keep increasing. So that what was once able to run on a (by today's standards) very slow processor, now needs a much faster one. There is a balancing point, too, between how much hardware to throw into a computer and the price it will end up costing the consumer. The war for your business between computer manufacturers has much to do with the current shape and styling of what actually ends up in the computer box. Can it be manufactured at a reasonable cost? Can we do it less expensively than the other guy? Et cetera.

But to get back to the processor itself... if you computer's processor is now so old that it simply "can't keep up" then there is little that can be done about this. Sometimes the processor can be upgraded to something newer, or replaced with a compatible but beefier chip from the same family, if such is still available. More often, the processor you got with the computer is what you are "stuck with."

What, then, is a "good processor" for a computer these days? There have been so many processors: Intel, AMD and others have created such a bewildering array of processors that it is nearly impossible even to list them all in a meaningful way. And the choices increase constantly. But here, in this article, we are looking at an existing computer that has "become slow." There are two questions to ask:

1: is the computer less than five years old?

2: was the computer ever fast when I was using it before?

If you can answer both of these questions Yes, then chances are good that the processor is still adequate for your needs, unless...

3: have my computer needs significantly changes recently? Am I doing more work, more complex stuff, playing newer games or watching videos where I wasn't before?

If the answer that that one is also yes, then you may really need to replace the computer, since it is possible that you have simply out grown your current computer

Memory: more than any other factor, memory can be a sharply affect a computer's performance. It Very Important to have at least enough memory in your computer for it to do what it's doing. So the key question is "what's enough memory?"

Terms: how do you measure the amount of memory? A "byte" stores one character of information. A "megabyte" store a million (actually, something over a million: 1,048,576 bytes). A "gigabyte" stores a billion (same foot note, it's more than a billion, but let's keep it simple). A "terrabyte" would be a trillion (in "American" or 1,000 million in "British") bytes of information. Lots times lots, that would be, but few computers will go that high on memory right now. Typically, new computers come with (or should) between 4 gigabytes and 8 gigabytes of memory. Five to seven years ago, 384 megabytes would have been more typical.

Let me digress a little here first. I find that many of the people I work with do not know the difference between memory and hard drive, and other basic components of the computer. There is a metaphor I like to use: the small office, consisting of a desk and a filing cabinet. You (the processor chip) sit down at the desk (power is on, you are booting up). One of the curious aspects of this office is that when you leave at the end of day (power down) anything still on your desk will be lost (over aggressive janitors perhaps), so it must always be put back in the filing cabinet before you leave, or that work will simply be gone forever. Now, your boss has some work for you to do. Let's assume it's something you've worked on before. Where was that work last saved? In the filing cabinet, of course. (The hard drive.) Storage for things when you're not working. You pull a folder out of the filing cabinet (how fast this happens is determined by the speed of the hard drive) and spread it out on your desk. If this is a big job, then you would probably prefer to have a big desk to spread it all out on at once. But the size of your desk is determined by the amount memory in the computer. If it is a small desk, then you may only be able to spread out a sheet of two at a time to work on. To get another sheet from the filing cabinet (hard drive) you must first put one the current sheets back, creating room for the next one, and so forth. Obviously you may spend a lot of time pulling single sheets out, putting them back, making a notation here, and then... oh gosh, where was that other sheet? Back you go. Sheets of paper endlessly coming out of the filing cabinet and going back again. This is very tedious and very slow. So your boss comes by and sees you doing all this very, very slowly, but being an enlightened boss he gets you a bigger desk (more memory). Now you can spread your work out far more effectively, and maybe even have more than one job spread out at a time. Now you need only go to the filing cabinet to put the work away (store it for another time) or to get another job to work on, or to put a new job inside a new folder away.

Now all of that said, we still have the question: how much memory is enough, so that computer isn't constantly swapping things from memory to hard drive and back again, just to open up my word document or what ever I have it doing? To an extent this is dependent on the operating system you are running. Windows XP, if all the updates and service packs are in place, really (really) needs at least 1 gigabyte of memory. 2 is better. Originally, Windows XP was happy with 384 megabytes (3/8 of a gigabyte), but XP grew over the years, with service pack 2 and then service pack 3, its capabilities became greater, and that meant more stuff spread around on the desk before it could even say, "Okay, what you want me to do?"

The short version to this is if you have less than 2 gigabytes of memory in your computer currently, consider getting some more. Especially if you are running Windows. I have two computers currently: one with 4 gigabytes, the other with 8 gigabytes. These are beefy machines, though, and you may not need that much yourself.

Determining if you need more memory

Under windows, there is a way to find out definitively if you do not have enough memory right now. Using task manager you can find out pretty fast if your system is having to much swapping between memory and hard drive. Right click on the task bar (usually at the bottom of your screen) in an area where there are no other icons and you will get a small menu, one of which should say (something like) "Start Task Manager".

Exactly what you see next will vary with the version of Windows you are using. However, it will be a small window showing lots of technical stuff. There should be a tab that says "Performance". Click on that. You should then see a display that will tell you specifically if you don't have enough memory, if your computer is doing that swapping to the hard drive thing (called paging, page swapping, or page faults, by the way). There should be an area that is labeled "Physical Memory" and shows several entries. What you are interested in here are the two "Total" and "Available". If Available is very low or even zero, you have a problem. Also, even simpler, there is a graph or chart (usually the 2nd graph) which shows very clearly how your memory status is. If the line is at the top of the chart, you are out of memory. Ideally, with the computer just sitting there, freshly booted, that line should be no more than 1/2 way up, preferably lower.

Of course, if your computer is running so slowly that it takes minutes (or even very many seconds) to get to task manager (I recently worked on a computer where this was the case: the computer turned out to have only 128 megabytes of memory, and it took about 5 minutes to get task manager to wake up -- I upgraded it to a full gigabyte (8x as much) and things started running like it was a real computer again) then that is strong indictator right there that your computer may need more memory. Waaaay too much time spent swapping papers in and out of the filing cabinet.

Hard Drive: Your hard drive is another piece that can making your computer run slowly overall. This is your storage, where data (photos, movies, documents, emails) are saved, even when the power is off. These are mechanical gadgets, however, and run necessarily at physical speeds, rather than at electronic ones. It's a rotating platter and data can be off of it only as fast as things can move around. This means that always the hard drive will be the slowest part of your computer. As hard drive technology improves, hard drives get faster, almost every year, they are faster than they were before, while at the same increasing in "size." A 1 terrabyte hard drive (1,000 gigabytes, or a 1,000,000 megabytes) is some faster than a current 320 gigabyte hard drive. One of the paradoxes of hard drives.

The question then is whether your hard drive is what is making your computer run slowly over all?

One important step in answering this is to first to good defragmentation on your hard drive. If you are using Windows, you may know about the defrag tool that ships with it. This, however, is not a very good defrager. A far better one is available (for free!) from Auslogics, Disk Defrag 3.1.9. This is an excellent tool and does a marvelous true defrag on your hard drive. (And it's free!) This is reclaim some efficiency and allow your computer to pull things off the hard drive much faster. Besides, it's free (did I mention that?).

(Defragmentation is similar to properly arranging a filing cabinet that become completely disordered. The same stuff is in it that was in it before but now it's all together and easier to find. All that one big piece of work is now under the A's where it belongs, instead of being spread around in 50 different places in the filing cabinet.)

If, after running Auslogics (or a similar product) on your computer, getting a good defragmentation done, the hard drive still seems to slow, and if the hard drive is an older one (say, 80 gigabytes or less)

Disk Defrag Warning: Do not do it compulsively. I have seen some folks who want defrag to run continuously or several times a day. This adds unnecessary wear to your hard drive while giving nothing back. Generally once a month is plenty.

Internet Connection Speed: Sometimes slow is only a thing that occurs at certain times, when you are doing certain things. Is the computer really slow all the time? Or only when you are trying to look at things on the internet? The speed of your internet connection is factor not determined by the computer. (Yes, many people do not know that the computer has little or nothing to do with that.) There are types of internet connection: dial-up is the worst. It's very slow. The slowest "hi-speed" connection is 8x faster than the best dial-up. The average hi-speed is better than that. However, an internet connection can be faulty in itself, and not delivering the performance advertised. This sort of problem can only be told for sure by the service reps for your service provider. Also, just because you have an internet connection that runs at, say, 1.5 meg (bytes per second) does not mean that all the internet will be available to you at that speed. Some internet websites have heavy traffic or are running on slow machines, or such. After all, a website is really just software running on another computer some place.

Alright... that's a rambling way of saying that not all internet connections are the same, and the actual performance of even a first rate connection can not always be predicted. The time of day, whether it's a weekend of not, can all effect your actual internet speed.

Another factor in internet performance is the browser you use. The top browsers are:

• Internet Explorer
• Firefox
• Chrome
• Opera
• Safari

More information comparing the various internet browsers here, also here

There are many articles on the internet offering comparisons of the various browsers. Not many of these articles agree with each other. So... I will muddy the waters a bit more by offering my two cents worth: Internet Explorer (versions 7 & 8 at least) is the slowest of the five browsers, while Chrome is the fastest, though the differences in speed between Opera, Safari and Chrome are small. As a programmer of websites, I end up using all five quite often, to make sure web pages behave as expected under each browser, for not all browsers behave the same way. Internet Explorer (IE), however, is notorious through out the web industry as a difficult item. The result is that sometimes you have web sites that will work only with IE or websites that will work with anything except IE. To make web pages work with any browser is sometimes a high art.

Viruses & Malware I can not say enough bad things about the people who create and knowingly propagate computer viruses. The penalties for being caught in these activities are not severe enough, by a good country mile. Viruses cause billions (at least) of dollars worth of damage every year: in lost productivity time, lost computer bandwidth and discouraged people who think "computers run slow and are very annoying" when really they've just had a bad virus experience and never got over it. Viruses can even damage your equipment and erase your hard drive, if they are that type of virus. They are a plague upon what is in fact the greatest achievement to date of the human race: the internet. Internet Terrorists need to be treated the same way as those who blow up office towers, for their goal is the same: chaos. (Rant, rant, and further rant. Take it as read at this point that I don't like computer viruses and would gladly see their authors locked up for life.)

Viruses are very easy to get on your computer and can be very easy or very hard to get rid of. But first...

What is a computer virus? Computers run software. That's what they do. Software is nothing but a series of instructions that amount to a large degree to "move this from there to here" or "add 12 to this value" and not really a whole lot else (believe it or not -- of course, that's very simplified, but still largely true). Software comes in types, according to the task it was meant to perform or aid with. Word processors, databases, spread sheets, internet browsers... and malware. Malware (viruses, technically, are only one type of malware) is software that is deliberately designed to cause trouble.

Well... entire books could be written about malware (viruses, trojan horses, worms, spyware, back-doors, etc.), what they are, why they exist, the socio-political implications, the similarity to biological viruses, the possible implications into the future, and on and on. However, for purposes of this article, which is about "Why is My Computer Running Slowly" I'll limit further discussion to how to detect and remove malware from your computer. Because (here's the really important part) malware can make you computer run very slowly...

Do you have a virus on your computer? Some times a virus will be obvious. Some times it will be obvious if you know what to look for. Some times they are not obvious at all. So, the question is: how can you tell?

One of the more obvious (to those who know) of the malware creatures going around right now is the Fake Security Center. This is actually a group of "products" that once on your computer pretty much take it over and make it nearly impossible to use your computer. This is some what similar to hostage-ware, where your computer is held hostage until you pay some money. Only in this case, you pay the money and you still can't use the computer.

This is a FAKE! It is not Windows' Security Center
This one just wants to get your money.
There are others, too. I have seen perhaps 8 completely different ones, but none of them really look exactly like the real thing.

This is a very nasty infection, and some times is pretty tough to get rid of. If you are not really handy with computers "under the hood" then it possibly best to get a professional to remove it for you. However, here's an article from Microsoft on the subject

This what Windows' Security Center actually looks like.

For viruses less obvious, less in your face (and some of them are entirely silent, you won't really know they are there at all, except that your computer's performance might be down, or emails are going out that you didn't send, and so on), you need a tool, like a virus / malware scanner. Most computers these days come with either Norton or McAfee already installed and either a year free or a trial subscription to their service. These are decent products, and they certainly have their reputations. Personally (my own opinion -- there are others) I do not recommend them. I find them too invasive and I also find that they use up too much of the computer's available performance. Especially for older computers this is a serious factor. What I usually recommend for people is AVG (the free version -- a full version can also be downloaded and subscribed to, if you wish the additional protection), and the free version of Malwarebytes Antimalware. What works well is to have AVG running all the time, and to occasionally manually run Malwarebytes. Be sure that both of these are kept up to date (they will update themselves regularly, so all you have to do is allow them to do so).

On a computer that I suspect is infected, I will usually run Malwarebytes first, let it eliminate what ever it thinks is infected or bogus first. Then I installed AVG and let it do another scan. The reason for using both is to keep it free. However, if you wish to purchase a full license to Malwarebytes ($24.95, at the time of this writing click here for current info) then AVG becomes optional. In general, it's not a good idea to run two virus checkers at the same time (Norton with McAfee, for instance -- the last time I encountered a machine set up that way, it didn't want to run at all), but so far I not noticed that AVG and Malwarebytes interfere with one another. They make a good combo.

I like AVG and Malwarebytes Antimalware better than, say, Norton or McAfee (personal opinion, again) because they are faster and use up less of my computer's time than Norton or McAfee do. Others will probably have other opinions. Hard and fast benchmarks are hard to come by in this area

The following are all high quality virus protection aids, and are definitely at the right price!
• AVG Home Page
• Malwarebytes Home Page
• Avast Home Page
• Microsoft Security Essentials