Why do computers slow down? (And how to fix it)

it seems to happen every time you get a new computer it starts out super fast but slowly and surely over the years it crawls to a near standstill and you might think that's just what happens when a computer gets old it slows down it's just the way the universe is but that's not really the case and that's what we're gonna talk about today why computers actually get slower and what you can do to completely reverse it now this video is sponsored by my Instagram account so I'm not really sponsored but if you want to check it out it's just at Theo Joe I try to post cool stuff on there every once in a while especially in the stories and if you want you can check out the highlights from CES this year Consumer Electronics Show lots of crazy stuff on there highly recommended again if you want to check that out just at Theo Joe on Instagram so getting back to why computers slow down a vast majority of the time it's not actually the hardware of the computer itself slowing down but rather the software that's been installed over time bloating it up taking up space and straining the resources of the computer which eventually slows it down and yes because it's software not hardware there are things you can do to reverse it one of the major ones is removing startup programs or at least stopping them from starting up and this is pretty obvious you may already know this but you weren't sure how to do that because programs running in the background obviously take up resources such as RAM CPU cycles so the more stuff you have starting up the more stuff that's always on in the background that's not good now to stop things from starting up it's pretty simple you don't have to uninstall the program altogether what you can do is if you're in Windows 10 you can open the task manager by pressing control shift escape and that'll bring it up and then you go to the startup tab and this is gonna show you all the programs that are starting up with Windows and if you want you can go through and you can right click it and hit disable and it's not gonna start up with Windows anymore so I would go through this and stuff that you know is not being used regularly you can disable it and this doesn't uninstall it so you can still start up whenever you want it just doesn't start up automatically of course there are some things where if you're not sure what it does at all I wouldn't necessarily disable it because some things might be like Drive that might be important or whatever so only disabled if you know what it is and you know that you don't need it to start up but if it does start causing problems of course you can rename it if you're on Windows 7 it's a little bit different you go to the Start menu and then you could type run and then I'll give the option to run a program and you type in MS config and then that will also bring up a different window that's gonna look different than what I just showed and you go to the startup tab in there and then it's kind of the same story disabled things you don't need a startup but don't touch any of the other tabs they might actually break your computer all right so next up the reason your computer might also be slowing down is because you have a lot of files that's taking up a ton of space on your hard drive and you're running out of free space and this might not be for the reason you think for why it's slowing it down so in the old days what would happen is your hard drive would get fragmented which means the hard drive would store different parts of one file all over the hard drive and it would be fragmented which meant that if you wanted to open one file the drive head of the drive might have to move to two different parts of the drive which would obviously slow things down so you would have to do something called defragmentation which would put all the files together now Windows 7 and later automatically does this so that's not a problem anymore and with SSDs it's completely unnecessary all together so the real reason that this may be slowing down your computer is the geometry of the hard drive it's a spinning plate and just by the nature of it the outer space of the drive on the outer rim is going to be moving faster than the inner part of the plate of the drive it's just physics geometry when you spin something the farther part moves faster which means it can read files quicker so of course this means that your hard drive is gonna try and put files first on the outer part of the drive and then eventually as it fills up start moving stuff inwards so if you delete a lot of stuff over time as your windows automatically D fragments and kind of reoptimize the drive it should improve in space because the files are being moved to be faster part of the drive so deleting files probably won't be an instant improvement but over time you'll probably notice it so what are some of the best ways to find what stake most space on your drive and there's always a lot of like temporary files files you completely forgot about big giant files you might not know our big and giant somewhere so the first thing you can do is use a free program called ccleaner which is gonna be able to search through like temporary files they might be taking a lot of space up and you can clear those out it also has some features like fixing registry errors and stuff like that but another one of my favorite programs which is so useful is called windier stat which is kind of unique you basically run this program and it analyzes your drive and then will show you visually where all the space is being taken up on your hard drive which files are huge and it'll show that by just showing a giant block showing a giant file it'll show you different types of files and it'll organize them by color if it's a different type of file so if you see a bunch of purple blocks for example that might be a ton of video files it will also arrange them by location by kind of just grouping them together so if you see a big group of a bunch of different of the same type of file you can look at that and they're probably gonna be in the same directory so this is gonna give you a very good visualization of maybe there are some giant files or several smaller files that add up to a bunch of space and this is a really easy way to find that and you might be able to see oh this one random file folder is taking up so much space I don't need that and then you can delete it of course if you don't know what something is maybe google it and also be aware that there are some system files like the hiber file which is like your hibernation file so don't mess with that that basically allows your computer to store all your ram into a file and then that will allow to boot up quicker don't mess with that that might show as a giant file but other stuff you could probably figure out your cellar just by googling alright next up another reason that's possible is that you might have a lot of dust in your computer and you might think well how does that affect the computer running but actually it does because a lot of dust might restrict airflow or stop air from coming into contact with for example the CPU fan or whatever and it will restrict heat from coming off of it and being taken out a computer by fans so if you dust out the computer then it could potentially reduce the heat which then might reduce throttling because if a computer part does get too hot typically that part will be throttled down and reduce performance so it doesn't get as hot so if you have a ton of dust in there caked on there vacuum it out usually this is gonna just be for computers that are very old or have not been taken care of very well at all like it's in a very dusty room or you have a lot of carpeting or something like that I would just open up and Peter take a peek inside if there's a ton of dust that's a problem if there's just a tiny bit probably not a big deal but you can always still get some canned air blow it out and vacuum it all right I think we're up to number four and that reason is of course viruses and malware I probably don't have to tell you this but if you have a virus that's doing whatever who knows what it's gonna be taking up resources that you're not gonna be able to use then on stuff you want to use it on of course windows these days does have built-in antivirus in the form of Windows Defender I'm not sure if it's still called that it's pretty decent but if you're really not good with computers at all and you're always going on sketchy websites and might not be good enough there are a lot of free antivirus programs these days and even a lot of paid ones have free versions now so this is gonna change the best antivirus is gonna change year to year so basically all you need to do is go on Google search best antivirus whatever year 2019 and then look at some reviews like PC Mag does good reviews and basically that's all you need to do find the best one or the one that you're familiar with get it and see if it does a scan and finds any viruses obviously if you get a paid antivirus it's probably gonna come with some extra features like Internet Security which I definitely recommend because that will do something like stop drive-by attacks will stop the virus from happening in the first place but if you want to just stick with the free one it'll probably be okay as long as you're not really messing with it all right so reason number six is more of like a very long-term reason so this is gonna be like over the course of five years plus one reason a computer might get slower is because just modern software being written kind of assumes that the computer is going to be a little bit more powerful so developers write in features or right processes that might need fasters hardware so of course if you have a 20 year old computer it's not going to be able to run software that is very modern so this of course is not the reason your computer is slower three or four years down the line but if it's older than five years it's possible but for the most part this also is only going to apply to like mostly heavy hitter programs such as like Adobe Premiere Pro like video editing stuff like that if you're just using a web browser email stuff like that that should really not slow down over the course of almost any amount of time unless it's like 10 years or something like that and the final reason we're going to talk about today is that it might just be a change in perception of course if you have a really old computer and then say you get a brand new iPhone or something like that you might be used to now the faster speed on your phone and the computer is gonna seem a lot slower and also these days we're kind of very used to stuff happening instantly you know Next Day Delivery whatever you might just be less patient so you click on something and if you think oh my computer so old it's so slow of course that small delay is gonna seem longer if it's just by placebo effect so if you get a brand new computer it might be the same exact delay but it might not seem as slow of course I'm not saying your computer being slow is all in your head it's just something to possibly think about now besides those reasons though what might be some other small things you can do to improve your computer speed and there actually are a few things so first of all the important thing is to always keep your operating system up-to-date and this is for many many reasons first of all for security you're a lot less likely to get a virus if your computer completely up to date on your computer because a lot of viruses target old outdated versions and also there might be better optimizations in the newer version of the operating system so definitely worth it to do that and also driver updates like if you have a graphics card when's the last time you updated your graphics card it's probably been a while because it's a little bit annoying you know it makes the screen go black and messes up your icons all that sort of stuff but it probably will improve perform quite a bit another thing you can do to make sure your hard drive is running in pretty good order is to use the check disk command so you can do this by opening the command prompt just go to the Start menu type in CMD and then hit enter and it should bring it up and you use the command check disk chk DSK and then do slash F and that F is gonna mean that it's gonna try and fix things and you can also specify a specific drive by doing check disk and then C or D : whatever Drive letter and then /f and that's gonna check for any errors on the drive bad sectors stuff like that try to repair it and that might improve things if there's a lot now another thing to keep in mind is if you're running these check disks regularly and you notice that you're getting a lot of errors that could be a sign that your hard drive is failing so if your computer's been running slow or you get a lot of these errors in combination with that you might want to get a new hard drive and also make sure of course your stuff is completely backed up though you should be doing that anyway another command prompt command you can use is the sfc /scannow command and this is going to mostly check the Windows installation files to see if there's any corrupted files and windows and of course try to repair that and that's always something good to run if you're having issues with Windows that don't really make sense it's always worth a try and finally another great program is the windows memory diagnostic tool I'm not sure how far back in versions of Windows this is available I know it's available in Windows 10 at least so you type in Windows memory diagnostic into the Start menu it'll come up and it'll probably require you restart the computer but this will run a memory check on your RAM and if there's any errors it will tell you now if you do have a lot of memory errors typically that's a hardware issue and you probably will just have to replace the RAM unfortunately and memory errors can cause a lot of weird stuff to happen that might not make sense at all for example way back in the day when I was playing a game called battlefield 2 I was getting these weird graphical glitches that I'll show you here where these bars would come out of different random objects and sure enough this was actually a memory error when I ran a memory check it showed a bunch of errors when I replace the RAM it fixed it so even though that looked like it was a graphical error something you would think was in the graphics card it was actually part of a ram air so that could explain some weird problems you're having run that command now if you do want some other ways to improve your computer speed I'd made a totally separate video on this topic that goes a lot more in-depth it's called 10 tips for making your computer faster for free and you can just find that on my channel try to put a link here that you can click on highly recommend that video so hopefully you enjoy that as well so until next time guys be seeing you

Channel: ThioJoe

Views: 797,751

Keywords: technology, tech, make computer faster, why do computers slow down with age, why do computers slow down, why does my computer slow down, faster computer, slow computer, how to, speed up computer, windows 10, computer, windows 7, microsoft windows, computer run faster, faster pc, computers, how to make your computer faster, windows, hard drive

Id: k_RpftRwrNk

Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 02 2019