Why do Computers Become Slow?

If you ask any computer owner, I’m sure you’ll find that at some point they have asked themselves “why is my computer so slow?”. For some users, their computer has taken a couple of years to become slow. For others, it happened in a matter of months. And for others it appeared to happen overnight. The point is that it’s a common experience that seems to affect everybody at some point or other.

There are quite a few people who think that this is evidence of a plot to force us to frequently buy new computers. I don’t subscribe to that myself, and I am going to tell you the reasons why.

Now, over the years I’ve seen a lot of different models of computer appear and disappear from the market, and I can quite confidently say that for the last 10 years most people have been using computers for the same thing, such as word processing, databases, spreadsheets, e-mail and web. So there is some truth to the fact that we are being sold new computers to do things that we were able to do on older computers.

However, in some areas the new, high-performance features a modern computers are important. For instance, video games require more power today than they did in the past. Also, people using their computers more for multimedia functions these days. They expect to store large quantities of music and video on their computer, and also a lot of people are getting into making their own videos these days.

With widespread broadband, the type of content we are accessing over the Internet has become richer, requiring a more powerful machine to process it.

So the fact is there is a naturally occurring demand for newer, more powerful computers, which means that computer manufacturers don’t need to resort to underhanded tactics in order to sell their wares. (That’s not to say that they don’t sometimes sell powerful computers to people who don’t need them.)

So, if it’s not evidence of an evil plot, why is it that computers become slow?

There are a number of different factors that can slow down your computer, and on this site I am going to be taking them up and telling you what you can do about each of them. For instance, it’s possible that a virus or other malware can infect your computer and slow it down considerably, and this is something you should suspect is a change in speed has been drastic and sudden. So I’m going to be talking about some of the tools and software that you can use to fix problems like these.