A common complaint we receive at Compu-Home is about what most people call “slowdown.” Without necessarily a specific or radical symptom, their computer just doesn’t seem to be operating as briskly or efficiently as it once did. This can seem to be a permanent condition, or it can be intermittent.
The first suggestion in dealing with this problem is something to avoid: We’re not big fans of the free or commercial registry editor software that offers to modify, boost, analyze or optimize your registry. . . don’t you just love those geeky-sounding solutions? The Registry is simply an internal database of the software and settings on a computer. If it is corrupted there can be serious consequences but the perils of meddling with it in an attempt to solve minor slowdowns hugely outweigh the potential benefits.
If your slowdown is intermittent, then it may be a symptom of what is actually a good thing! Your virus protection may be conducting a scan of your computer, and this process may be using some of your RAM and processor speed. Most people set their virus protection to update itself at 1:00 am and then run a scan of their hard drive(s) at 2:00 am. If your computer is turned off overnight, the updating-and-scanning activity might be set to start when you turn your system on again the next day. You can clarify this by opening your virus protection utility, checking its settings, and adjusting them to better fit your schedule if necessary.
Nowadays, every new program you install wants to be your best friend forever by placing itself in your Startup folder, thus saving a few seconds when you want to launch it. The problem is that every program in Startup is stealing a tiny bit of your computer’s resources to keep itself at the ready, when the benefits are usually negligible – do you really care if a program takes ten seconds to launch instead of six? Two free utilities from Mike Lin (www.mlin.net) are helpful in controlling this problem: Startup Monitor allows you to decide whether or not a new program will be allowed into the Startup folder, and Startup Control Panel displays the programs that are already there so that you can remove the unnecessary ones. Be very careful; remove only software that you are certain doesn’t have to be there, like media players, camera utilities, messengers and office suites.
If your computer is even just a couple of years old, it might benefit from additional RAM. RAM is the short-term memory of your computer, and it is generally agreed that what was considered adequate a few years ago is a little less than realistic now. Fortunately, RAM is inexpensive to buy and quick to install. There’s a pretty fair chance that you can call a reputable shop to find out when they’re not busy, bring in your computer, and double your RAM for less than $100.00, on the spot. The results will definitely be noticeable.
There is a very gray line between viruses and spyware, and sometimes spyware can slip past even the best virus protection. The job of most spyware is to report your computer activities back to its home base, and of course this uses up a bit of your computer’s resources and your Internet connection. You can install a free utility like Malwarebytes to seek out spyware and get rid of it. The procedure is to disable your usual virus protection, and run Malwarebytes manually.
This leads us to another common problem: two virus protection programs running simultaneously can seriously hamper the computer’s activities. We often get calls from people who have agreed on the phone to install the protection utilities of their Internet Service Provider, not realizing that this will conflict with the virus software they already have. These utilities don’t play nice together, and you should choose one (we like AVG) and stick with it, except for occasionally calling on Malwarebytes as described above.
The last possibility is that it’s not that your computer has slowed down, but that you have sped up! A computer that is a couple of years old may be working just as efficiently as it ever did, but it may possibly seem slower in comparison to the one you use at the office, or a new laptop you just bought. Websites are richer than they used to be, and software is more and more sophisticated. Don’t blame the machine for our evolving expectations.
We at Compu-Home are delighted to announce the launch of our new website. The guru who designed and accomplished our upgrade is none other than Chris Solar, who is also the Webmaster of the brand-new OSCA Website. It was a pleasure to work with Chris on our exciting project.