A customer and friend recently asked what he could try on his own to remedy a slow Windows computer,
before possibly scheduling an appointment for me to come out and look at it.
I get this question often. On the surface, you might think that I’d be hesitant to answer it in any substantial way. After all, if told him how to get his computer running faster - and it worked - he wouldn’t need me. But the truth is I’m more interested in helping people getting their technology working properly, period. I know that for the ‘bigger stuff,’ he’ll call me. He knows I have his best interests in mind and am more interested in a good, long-term customer relationship than a quick buck.
That said, this is usually a very tricky question to answer. The main issue is that there are SO many reasons a computer could be running slow, and so lots of things need to be investigated. Sometimes it’s obvious: age. For example, a really old Gateway tower that came originally with Windows 98 and was upgraded Windows XP is going to be slow, period. Especially when it still has only 128 megs of RAM.
“Yes, but I used it for years and it's always done everything I needed it to do and it didn’t really seem slow until recently...”
That’s a valid point which I’ll demolish nonetheless.
First, realize that everything ELSE in the computer world has gotten bigger and faster. There was no YouTube or iTunes when your computer was produced, no matter how cutting edge it was at the time. File sizes all around were much smaller. And networking is different today. When you were on dial-up (egads!), your Internet connection was so slow that your computer seemed fast by comparison. Fast forward to 2008. All this “Web 2.0 stuff,” multimedia, games, digital photography, webcams - it all requires ever-greater horsepower. It sorta creeps up on you. But then one day - WHAM - your computer is “suddenly” slow.
Oh, and let’s not forget a little something I call “OS Rot.” Windows operating systems, especially, will develop a sort of virtual decay over time. Programs have been installed and removed, viruses and spyware discovered and fixed (or not), drivers updated, and so forth. Windows does not always handle this gracefully, and one of the main reasons is the Windows registry.
I could go into a whole article on just the registry, but suffice it to say that it’s a big, cumbersome filing system containing configuration and launch settings and parameters for everything that runs in Windows, from your desktop settings and default fonts in Word to booting parameters. It is easily corrupted, not easily optimized, and - after just a year or even a few months - gets littered with all sorts of debris.
Hand-in-hand with OS rot are Windows services - things that are running on your computer but aren’t really programs per-se (although sometimes they are). Print Spooler is a service, for example. It handles traffic between your computer and your printers.
Some programs are notorious for going a little crazy with service installations - Nero CD burning software comes to mind. After you install programs like Nero, not only do you have 10 new things in your start menu - but you've got all kinds of extra services of dubious value that start-up every time you boot your computer.
To check out your running services, go to Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Services. One column shows you which services are running, and another indicates their start preference (disabled, manual, or automatic). There's also a brief description which may or may not be useful.
This is a realm within which you want to tread carefully. Most people can usually stand to disable 3-5 services, but if you disable the wrong ones you could really hamper some particular function or another on your system (although it's easy to undo - messing with services isn't as dangerous as messing with the registry).
Spend some quality Google time checking any that look unfamiliar. Or better yet, leave them alone if you’re just not sure. Any improvements you make, unless you're able to whack really egregious and useless services to recover resources, will be marginal.
So what can you do about your slow old system?
I can tell you what I do NOT recommend: registry cleaners, speed boosters, and other gimmicky software that claims to make things run faster. There’s no free lunch. I’ve never seen anything that really works as advertised, other than physical hardware improvements. In fact, I’ve seen systems get totally whacked by this stuff. And I don’t recommend putting good hardware money into a REALLY old system. So, save your pennies and plan on a new computer to replace your old eMachines 1999-vintage computer. Windows ME in the wild is rare for a reason, you know.
If your system just isn't that old BUT is running slowly, here are some other things you can look at:
- Fragmented hard drive
- Hard drive that’s about to fail
- Lack of disk space - and I mean, you’re down to less than a gig free.
- Virus or spyware taking over computing resources
- Bad network card constantly churning out malformed packets
- Problematic Windows update causing conflicts with other software on your system
- Missing firmware updates for motherboard or other hardware components
- Backup software running during your peak usage times
- Neighbors are using your wireless broadband
Fact is, there are simply too many steps and variables to list here. I’m not sure I could even easily explain in writing how to perform general performance troubleshooting. I've been doing this for so long, that now I kinda start just poking and clicking around and follow my intuition. It seems unscientific, and sometimes it takes only a little time and sometimes a lot. But I usually get it figured out.
Unfortunately, sometimes it's cheaper for my customers to tombstone a not-that-old computer than to pay somebody by the hour to fix it. It's just the reality of commodity PCs and low hardware prices. People don't want to pay 50% of what their computer costs for repairs or upgrades, yet IT professionals can't afford to reduce rates low enough to be commensurate with cheap PC prices. It would be like pursuing a career in toaster repair.
Anyways, to wrap-up this novel: if your system is running slow and you need help, feel free to give me a call. I may not have a snappy, silver-bullet answer for you. But neither am I doing a mental "cha-ching." It just is what it is.
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