How to fix a slow PC. This is a question asked by many of my customers. In this short article, I will explain the five leading causes of the dreaded slowdown.

1 Your Computer Has Not Been Rebooted for A Long Time

Leaving your computer on for days at a time may result in it becoming sluggish and, in some cases, it may even freeze up entirely.  The most common cause is memory-related; the computer Random Access Memory (RAM) has not been purged of data from programs any longer in use.

Our Recommendation: Shut down or reboot your computer at least once every 24 hours. This forces the RAM to be purged.

2 Disk Corruption or Fragmented Hard Disk

One of the many causes of disk corruptions are improper shutdown or in when an external hard drive is incorrectly dismounted. Other significant reasons for data corruption are virus infections and overheating hard drives. File fragmentation causes your hard drive to take longer to retrieve information and results in the all to well known “SLUGGISH” computer syndrome.

Our Recommendation: Defrag your computer once a month and check for bad sectors. NEVER defrag a Solid-State Drive (SSD). It is not necessary and may even shorten the life of the SSD.

3 Low available memory (RAM)

Programs you use are continually upgraded and new features added. The result is that they require more resources (RAM) operate correctly. The minimum amount of RAM for today’s entry-level computer is 4 Gig. However, we are finding that this is proving to be too little.

Our Recommendation: Consider upgrading your RAM to 8 Gig. This will ensure an improvement in the load speed of your applications. If you need assistance to upgrade your computer, send an email to sales@abacon.co.za, and we will assist you.

4 Too much paging

Paging is the process used by computers to store sections of the programs in use on the hard drive instead of in RAM. This enables you to load and run multiple applications and utilise your memory efficiently.  However, when your RAM is low, larger sections of the program will be stored on in the paging file on your hard drive. This results in a significant program slowdown. i.e. your computer becomes sluggish.

Our Recommendation: It is time to consider installing more RAM and possibly an SSD drive into your computer.

5 Infected by malware or virus(es)

Viruses and malware can cause your computer to slow down. Some of the primary causes for the slowdown may be:

• Starting a cryptocurrency mining application.
• Loading multiple copies of the same virus
• Creating an email server on your computer to send out spam emails
•  Sending out a large volume of traffic to specific computers as part of a Denial Of Service attack

Our Recommendation: Ensure that you have the latest version of your antivirus software loaded and install all the latest security updates for your operating system.

How Can We Help You

If you need any assistance to complete these tasks, or you have any computer problems give us a call on 072 601 2858 or send an email to sales@abacon.co.za

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