A mechanic gets, “what’s the rattle under the hood?”  A doctor gets, “my nose is running, ears hurt and I have a cough and it won’t go away.”  I get, “why is my computer running so slow.”

Here are the four most common answers I can give:

  1. Spyware
  2. Virus
  3. Poor management
  4. Outdated system

First spyware.  It lurks in everything.  Big companies want to figure out how to market toward YOU, so they track what you do, similar to putting a security camera in your living room so NBC can watch you watch TV.  Sometimes it’s more menacing; a snotty-nosed kid wants to steal your bank account info, so he sends out a key logger to track it.  Whatever it is that’s putting spyware on your computer, there are ways to prevent it.  The biggest is to avoid shady websites.  Just like there are bad parts of a neighborhood or dark alleys you wouldn’t go down in broad daylight, there are places on the internet that are bad news.  Usually they look illegal.  Stay away.  Next thing to do on your quest to be spyware free is to get a better browser.  By better, I mean something other than Internet explorer.  Firefox is, in my opinion the best, and the newest version comes standard with some Phishing (making you think you’re at one site when you’re really at another) prevention built in.  On top of security, things just look better and work smoother in Firefox.  Next up, stop downloading “free” games and toolbars for your browser and quit downloading random files from P2P services, these are absolutely riddled with spyware.  Yes it might seem cute that you can play poker all day long and add awesome smiley faces to your email; but it isn’t doing anything for the coronary it’s going to give you when it takes 14 hours for your email program to start up.  Lastly and most obviously install some spyware scanning software.  Spybot search and destroy and AdAware are both free (the safe kind of free) so there’s no reason they shouldn’t be installed on your computer and regularly ran and updated.

Viruses.  Honestly, I don’t have very much in the way of personal experience with viruses.  Why?  Because I don’t get them.  I must pay an exorbitant amount of money in subscription fees for anti-virus software then right?  Wrong.  AVG has a free edition that I’ve used for a long time and it’s worked like a charm.  It’s also important to actually activate your anti-virus program (you need to have the burner on to boil the water) and turn on the automatic updates so you’ll have the latest virus definitions on your system.

Poor management.  In the tech support world this is known as, “the problem exists between keyboard and chair.“  A computer is a tool, it’s dumb (unless you actually have Johnny Five), so it’s up to you to take care of it.  This means tidying up every now and then.  Here’s a brief and in no way expansive tidying up tutorial.  First clean your desktop.  If you’re growing an icon farm you’re probably contributing the most to your slowness problem.  If those shortcuts are absolutely necessary, create a new folder on your desktop and name it “shortcuts” and then move all of those unnecessary necessary icons into the folder.  After you discover you have a background picture and change it, look down.  Right beside the current time, is your system tray.  There should be a bunch of icons hanging out down there; some are necessary, some aren’t.  Get rid of the one’s that aren’t.  Anything in the system tray is a program that remains open in the background so it can be launched quickly, and this has the side effect of slowing things down.  So, if you’re not using it that often, evict it.  Finally, defrag your hard drive and turn on Windows firewall.

Last on the list of things that are slowing your system down is outdated hardware.  Computers aren’t like wine.  Instead of aging gracefully, computers become crippled and die and develop plague-like symptoms.  If you’re noticing a delay and you’ve already tried all the things mentioned already, it may be time to take old yeller out back.  Computers are becoming more and more affordable, so it shouldn’t be the end of the world.  Also, a new computer gives you a chance to try something new like a better operating system.

So, hopefully I’ve solved one or two of your problems and saved you $300 on a twenty second repair.  Just remember computers are our friends.

Tags: , , , ,