Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Slow Computer Problems - Their Cause

By Edwood Maurice Walker

After a year or two, it's usually the case that our computers seem much slower than before. In this article, I want to cover some of the main reasons for this, and let you know what you can do about it.

The main situations that lead to slow computer performance are memory (RAM) and the hard drive. Computers work with data, and moving data around and manipulating it consume the main part of the computer's time. The speed and capacity of the RAM and hard disk determine the speed of these operations - they have a bigger effect than the processor speed.

As your computer gets older, it will have much less RAM than newer computers. This means that it may not have enough RAM to run the latest, most demanding programs at an acceptable speed.

This means that your computer is probably suffering from insufficient RAM. When this happens, it will use the hard disk as a substitute - the only problem is that the hard disk is much slower than the RAM.

The hard disk can become slower over time. As it is filled up, it seems to be working slower. This is because the fastest areas of the disk are used first (the fastest areas are on the outside, the slowest are in the middle.) When data is stored near the middle of the disk, it can be much slower to load and save data.

This should show you that by upgrading your RAM and hard disk, you can get a big boost in performance. This is naturally much cheaper than buying a new computer. There are other things that you can do which are much less extreme than replacing the hard disk and RAM, and you can read about them by following the link below. Sometimes slow down can indicate more serious problems - this site will also discuss those problems, too.

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