Why Do Computers Get Slow Over Time?

is your computer today considerably slower than it was when you first bought it well today we're going to talk about why that happens and what you can do about it stay tuned [Music] you know I'm sure we've all been there a few years ago you bought or built a brand new top of the line system and it was the fastest thing you've ever used the boot time was amazing applications would launch almost as fast as it took for you to click the icon you could play almost every game from Steam on the highest settings and everything just worked perfectly however today not so much when you first turn your computer on it takes forever to boot sometimes you have to click on an icon a couple of times and after a long wait the program finally launches and continues to launch as many times as you click the icon you find yourself lowering game settings all the way down just to get a playable frame rate and it seems like nothing works the way that it's supposed to it really does make you think that maybe the computer manufacturer is turning some dials to make your system slower so you'll have to buy a new one this phenomenon is called Bland obsolescence and while that can be part of the problem it's not really what's happening but you know what before we go any further we got to pay some bills so check out today's sponsor is your copy of Windows 10 unactivated well it doesn't have to be because with today's sponsor VIP SCD key you can get a valid Windows 10 license for under twenty dollars stop dealing with that stupid watermark on the desktop the valid license for Windows 10. also with an activated copy of Windows 10 you can upgrade to Windows 11 for free just go to the link in the description below and pick up a valid Windows 10 license key during checkout use the code cyber CPU for a 25 discount once you have your key go to your activation settings in Windows 10 and click on the link that says change product key enter the product key you just purchased and hit activate now you don't have to deal with that stupid Watermark that come with running an unactivated copy of Windows 10. now on with the video now many people claim that the reason in your computer is slowing down is because it was engineered to slow down like I said before this is called planned obsolescence and this seems to make sense but unfortunately that's not what's happening no what's actually happening is that just because you bought a new computer doesn't mean that technological development ceases every single day companies are developing faster and faster Hardware while the hardware in your shiny new computer is only ever going to be as fast as it was when it was brand new because of this and the fact that software continues to be developed it becomes more and more resource intensive in fact Windows 10 has changed so much that they don't even use those build numbers anymore the latest build of Windows 10 is 22h2 and it's much more complicated of an operating system than it was in 2015. Hardware is also considerably faster today than it was in 2015 and it's also true that Hardware manufacturers do actually want to sell you new hardware however there is very little planned obsolescence happening in most cases and you know what to be perfectly honest with you I think the majority of planned obsolescence happens on Apple Computers more than it does on PCS and there's definitely a lot of that going on in the smartphone market in reality what's actually happening is that software is becoming more and more complicated and in some cases more and more bloated while your Hardware remains exactly the same and you know what this is obviously going to cause your computer to get slower and slower and this doesn't even count all of the software that you installed on your system since it was brand new there's a good chance that most people have programs installed on their computer that they haven't launched for years and there's even a better chance that you have software running on your computer that you didn't even know you had installed in the first place so let's jump on the computer and I'll show you how to take care of that so I went ahead and installed Windows 10 on my system here just because chances are if you're running an older system it's not going to be on Windows 11 you're probably still going to be on windows 10. so what we're going to do now is we're going to look at programs that are installed on your system that you just simply don't need and ways that you can remove them so the first thing we're going to do is go into control panel and to do that just search for control panel in the start menu and go ahead and launch it just like that and then from here we're going to click on uninstall a program and then from here you want to just scroll through and see programs that you just don't want like one that you're commonly going to see is McAfee Security scan plus so once you find the program that you don't want anymore then you just go ahead and click uninstall and then from here go ahead and say yes to the user account control and it should go through the uninstall process and then just click uninstall and it'll remove the program from the computer so now that this one's uninstalled you can kind of scroll through and you can look at other programs that you may not want like for instance CD burner XP this is a CD burner program that's used to create CDs well if you look at my system here I don't even have a CD-ROM on it so there's no way I'm going to be burning CDs anytime soon so that's the kind of program that I could probably get rid of so to get rid of it all you got to do is just click on it hit uninstall just like this say yes to the user account control and then go ahead and go through the prompts and just tell it to remove the program and then once the program's uninstalled you can continue to scroll through and find other things that you simply may not want on your computer like for instance now that we're in 2023 there's a lot of people that may have zoom installed on their computer and simply don't need it so if you'd like to get rid of it all you got to do is just click on it and go ahead and hit uninstall go through the whole list of programs that you have installed and find which ones you want to get rid of now once you've gone through the programs and features from control panel there's another way you can do this as well so what I'm going to do is go ahead and close control panel click on start and then click on settings and then from here we're going to go into Apps and then you can scroll through this list right here and it's it's essentially the same thing as admin remove programs was but this one here also includes Windows apps as well so you can scroll through here and see if there's anything that you simply don't want like clip champ yeah I don't want that so we can go ahead and uninstall it and then you can keep going scrolling through here Disney plus yeah I don't want Disney plus so we'll go ahead and uninstall that and the idea here is just to essentially look for programs that you simply don't want and go ahead and get rid of them because there's no point in having them take up resources on your system if you're not going to be using them and now I'm going to go ahead and show you one more way where you can remove programs as well so we're going to go ahead and close this click on the start button and then if you scroll through right here and you just scroll through this list and you find anything on this list that you don't want all you got to do is go down to it so let's see if we can find one here that I don't want on here so okay so what we're going to do is I'm going to go ahead and look at Skype right here so I'm going to right click on it and click on uninstall and then it'll uninstall it right from the start menu so you don't even have to go into settings so now that we've removed unnecessary apps from your system we there might be some apps that you really don't use all that often but you still want to keep installed now the fact that you don't use these apps very often means that they really don't need to be running in the background all the time so one great way to help boost your performance on an older system is to kill some of these apps running in the background let's jump back on the computer and I'll show you how to do it okay so we're going to go ahead and the very first one this is the most basic way you can kill startup apps is to go into task manager so go ahead and right click on your taskbar click on task manager and then from task manager you want to click on Startup right here and this will give you a list of different apps and stuff like that that you currently have starting your system up now you can go through here and you can decide what apps that you really don't want to get rid of but you really don't want to waste all of your system resources too so for instance on this one let's take Spotify let's say I want to keep Spotify on my system but there's no need to have it running in the background every single time I turn my computer on so you just click on the app itself and then go ahead and push disable at the bottom corner right here and it'll stop that app from launching when you start Windows now there's another way you can do this too so I'm going to go ahead and close task manager here we're going to click on start I'm going to go into settings right here and then from settings we're going to click on apps and then we're going to click on Startup and this is essentially the same list you get from task manager it's kind of a little harder to get to that's why I typically use task manager but if you want to you can get through here too so and just like before you just go ahead and select the app you want and just turn it off so for instance I don't want Cortana and in fact I don't want phone link running either so I can flip that off too and go ahead and just turn off all of the apps that you think you're not going to need running on your system now the next one we're going to do and this one's a little bit more advanced I'm going to go ahead and close settings click on start button and you're just going to type Ms config and then go ahead and hit enter and it'll start the MS config app here now you can go up to Startup but it's just going to tell you to go to task manager and this isn't the reason we're going into Ms config in this case what we're going to is to look at some of the services that are running so go ahead and click on the services Tab and then you want to check hide all Microsoft services and what this will do is just give you the services that are running for other third-party applications that aren't associated with Microsoft and you can kind of go through here and you can decide which ones that you want to turn off so I've got a couple of options here I've got the Google Update service which I don't really want to turn that off I kind of like my browser to stay updated and I also have the foxit PDF Reader update service well I really don't care if foxit reader is updated so we'll go ahead and uncheck that hit OK and those will ask you if you want to restart your computer and normally I would say at this point you can go ahead and restart but I'm going to exit without restarting now one thing that you have to remember from startup apps and a lot of people get really scared because of this because they don't know which ones they should stop and which ones they shouldn't and one thing that you can kind of reassure yourself on is that there's not a lot of damage you can cause by stopping apps from running now if you go into Ms config and stop the wrong Services you can cause some damage but from the task manager or from settings just killing startup apps isn't really going to cause much problems if you turn the wrong app off then you're going to lose some functionality and if that functionality is something you want well then you're going to have to turn it back on again so just keep in mind you can experiment with what you want to turn off by turning it off and on and seeing what difference it makes if you don't notice a difference then maybe it's a good idea just to leave it off now the next one we're going to talk about today is a little bit controversial but to be perfectly honest with you I don't think this should be a controversial topic but I do understand why it's controversial for some people but it doesn't change the fact that this is an issue and that issue is mechanical hard drives I'm going to spend a little bit more time on this subject in this video just to respond to some of the objections that I've gotten in past videos here's the thing modern versions of Windows cannot run on a Spinning Disk with any expectation of reasonable performance it's just not possible modern versions of Windows simply access the hard drive too often and expect too much from it for a mechanical drive to be expected to perform reasonably now this wasn't the case with Windows 7 or even early builds of Windows 10. however today a computer running a primary spinning disc is going to be an absolute dumpster fire in regards to performance I mean here's the thing you may be happy with the performance but if you upgrade to an SSD you would be blown away at the difference if you're watching this video and you're using a spinning disc as your primary drive the One Singular thing that you can do in order to jump up the performance is to pitch that spinning disc and upgrade to an SSD and I mean that's just a fact I mean don't get mad at me for making that statement I'm just the messenger but here's the thing there are some legitimate objections to using spinning discs with modern versions of Windows the first and I think the most common objection that I get is that ssds are expensive when you start getting into higher capacities and you know what I completely agree with you anything over about two terabytes starts to get really pricey really quick but you know what that doesn't mean you have to have an eight terabyte primary drive in your system there's nothing wrong with using a one terabyte SSD is a primary drive and a Spinning Disk as a secondary Drive what you want to avoid is having windows installed on a Spinning Disk I mean this is the thing I preach against using spinning disks in modern versions of Windows all the time but I have a file server with 24 terabytes of storage that is definitely not getting that capacity with ssds so spinning discs still make a great storage drive but don't use them as your primary drive they're good for large capacity cheap storage and really nothing else now the second objection that I typically get to the use of ssds is that in some countries even small ssds are prohibitively expensive and with this argument all I can say is I'm sorry that genuinely sucks but it doesn't change the fact that the performance increase that you're going to see from upgrading your primary drive to an SSD is massive all I can recommend and for people that fall into this situation is to try to find a small SSD Windows 10 and 11 will fit on a 250 gig SSD in fact that's what I use to keep a clean copy of Windows 10 and 11 installed and ready to go for this system right here to make it easier for me to switch between 10 and 11 when I'm making videos with the full operating system and all the programs that I need to do screen capture and everything else that drive only is about half full now granted I only use this drive to store the operating system and when I want to use it I clone it to a one terabyte SSD that's already installed in the system but if a 250 Gigabyte SSD is all you can afford then there's no reason why you can't install Windows on that and then store all of your data on a Spinning Disk anyway with that said if you get nothing else from this video just understand that the performance difference between a system that uses a primary SSD versus a primary hard drive is almost incalculably better now the next topic that can cause a computer to slow down over time depends a lot on how long you've had your computer and how much maintenance that computer has seen for instance if you've had your computer for a decade and for all that time it's been sitting under your desk collecting dust then the first question I have to ask you is are you cranking your speakers just to hear me right now over the sound of your fans ramping up to their top speed you know that sound isn't normal right I mean your computer should be for the most part fairly silent if everything is operating the way it's supposed to most computers are air cooled and even with water cooled systems you still need air to cool the radiators down in order for that air to move around you need to use fans the downside to fans is that they collect dust but luckily there's a lot of things that you can do to mitigate ate this problem first and foremost get that computer cleaned out if it's been a while since you've blown the dust out of your system or if you've never blown the dust out of your system then you need to shut it down disconnect everything and then bring it outside and blow the dust out of it it's really important to blow that dust out of your system outside doing it inside is just going to make a huge mess and all that dust you blow all over your room is going to need to go somewhere and it's likely going to be sucked right back into your computer when you turn it on also I once heard that ninety percent of dust is human skin cells so it's probably not a great idea to be breathing all that in you know I mean it's just me when you blow the dust out of your computer there's a couple of things you need to keep in mind though the first thing is to make sure you don't use excessive air pressure that could damage the components in your system I personally use a regular air compressor because I have one available but if you don't a can of air that you buy from like Staples or any other office supply store should work just fine just make sure that you're using the can of air turned up and not upside down you don't want to spray the liquid that comes out of it onto electronic components because you know liquid on electronics is never good and secondly it to make sure that you don't spin your fans up with the air source that you're using there's a couple of reasons for this first off you don't want to take the chance of spinning those fans up past their rated RPM I've done this before and the fan blades can quite literally blow off the fan trust me it's not fun and can actually be a little dangerous the second reason is that if there isn't a diode in your fan explicitly meant to stop the backwards feed of electricity you could be generating Power by spinning your fan back into the motherboard and unregulated power going in the wrong direction could something times cause problems this is typically only a problem with cheap fans but it's worth it either way to just hold the fan when you're blowing it out what I recommend doing is just using your free hand to hold the fan stationary while you're blowing through it this should clean the dust out from behind the fan and not allow the fan to spin out of control you can also manually move the fan blade around with your finger in order to get all the dust out around it but you know what if for whatever reason the dust doesn't come out from behind the fan then you can always just remove the fan and then use more air pressure to remove the dust behind it but once the dust is all blown out of your case this would be a great time to replace the thermal paste on your CPU over time thermal paste can get hard and crack making it ineffective at transferring heat I personally recommend thermal Grizzly thermal paste because I've had really good luck with it in the past but any brand thermal paste should work fine at least it should work better than the nasty dried up Factory thermal paste that you're currently using between your CPU and cooler now up to this point I've only been talking about how to clean dust out of a desktop computer if you're using a notebook computer then it's a little bit more complicated first and foremost if you're using a notebook computer don't ever blow air into the vents in order to try to clean the dust out all you're doing is blowing all that dust into the fan and you're making the problem even worse for yourself for a notebook the only way to clean it properly is to disassemble it you need to take the cooler and the fans completely off of the notebook and blow them out individually then when you reinstall them make sure that you replace the thermal paste you've already gone this far so there's no point in putting it back together with that nasty old thermal paste that you had in there before if you don't think that you have the capability to take your notebook apart and put it back together working then it might be a good idea to take the notebook to somebody who's done it before it might be worth just paying someone to do it for you than to break something and have it cost you even more effects the only downside is that if you pay someone else to do it for you you're never going to learn how to do it yourself I've been a technician for a long time and I will openly admit that when I was first getting started I broke a lot of computers before I started to learn how to fix them now once you get your computer completely clean there's a few things that you can do in order to stop them from getting dirty again first and foremost don't put your computer on the floor under your desk personally I like to make my computers really pretty so I keep them up on my desk so I can look at them but if you don't necessarily have to do this I just recommend having a computer at least a couple feet off the ground if you've ever watched the peanuts then you probably remember walking around with the big cloud of dust behind him well this really is happening when you walk around your room and all that dust is getting sucked right into your computer so just by keeping your computer a few feet off the ground or even better up on top of your desk stops a lot of the dust from getting inside the next thing that you can do to stop dust from getting into your computer is to make sure that when you build your system you have more airflow coming in than airflow exhausting out of the case and this is because no computer case is airtight not only are there vents all over the case but there's also cracks between the side panels and the front panel and the back panel and the top if your system has negative pressure inside it's going to be sucking air through all of those cracks and with it comes dust if you use a case that has dust filters and you keep the air pressure in your case positive by pulling in more air than you're exhausting out than all of those little cracks are going to be blowing air out instead of sucking dust in now moving on to the next tip this one should be obvious but if you have an older computer that's been slowing down a lot recently it could be a sign that you're infected with malware now this video isn't going to go in depth in how I remove malware if I did then it would be entirely too long maybe in the future I'll make a video on my process of checking a system for malware and how to remove it let me know in the comments below if that's a video that you'd like to watch now there's lots of ways to speed up an older computer but sometimes a computer simply gets so old that it needs to be replaced unfortunately this is the reality that we deal with with modern technology my first computer was a 386 SX that had a base of 16 megahertz but I did overclock it to 20 megahertz the system had two megabytes of ram not two gigabytes two megabytes and two 20 megabyte hard drives that system would barely run Windows 3.1 unfortunately you wouldn't even be able to open Twitter Twitter or X or whatever it's called now with that system and to be honest with you I'm kind of happy about that I like that Tech has grown since my days of high school so no your computer is not getting slower because of planned obsolescence it's getting slower because Tech is getting better and as technology gets better we're going to have to upgrade our systems occasionally because they're eventually not going to be able to run the software that they need to run to take advantage is of those advancements in technology so if you're getting close to needing a new computer then I highly recommend building one yourself and if you want to do that check out this video where I show you a really important tip that you should do before building a new computer I should do a new video on building a computer shouldn't I let me know in the comments below if that's something you'd like to see as always you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 54,479

Keywords: planned obsolescence, Slow computer, why do computers slow down with age, why do computers slow down, why does my computer slow down, increase startup speed, make computer faster, faster computer, windows 10, how to, speed up computer, microsoft windows, how to make your computer faster, why is my computer slow, fix slow boot up windows 10, faster pc, how to fix slow computer, computer run faster, how to speed up windows 10, how to speed up your computer

Id: ma_lkZQ1pao

Length: 23min 59sec (1439 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 21 2023