What Makes A Computer Slow

I had been using my computer from the date of purchase for all the online activities, right from chatting with friends to downloading music's, videos, etc., interacting friends and family members in social networking sites, online marketing, banking, and almost all the online activities that a common person does in his day to day life. My computer has the Windows XP professional, Service Pack 2, operating system at present. I had installed antivirus to safeguard against viruses. Now I am facing a problem with my computer. The system starts functioning much slower when I log in to some of the sites. I am not sure whether it is because of my Operating System or because of the website I am logging in to. Even though I try a number of things like clearing caches, temporary internet files, etc. I don't regain the actual speed. I am quite confused with the problems that started to show up recently.

What may be the reasons for slowing up my connectivity? Is this an attack of virus or something else? What are the measures I have to adopt for getting rid of these problems? Or do I need to change my current Operating System?

My RAM is 1 GB and HDD capacity is 40 GB, Intel Pentium 4 microprocessor.

I will appreciate your suggestions.

 

 

 

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

Hey Asomormridul. I have a few suggestions for you. First check your Task Manager (CTRL ALT DELETE) and click the Processes tab and and sort the list by "CPU". Look over it for a few seconds and see if there are any "Image Names" or software that are going crazy and using up all the CPU. When your CPU is being used, it really slows things down. It's normal if you are using a cpu intensive software like a game or editing software but sometimes a buggy program will keep running in the background. There shouldn't be too much using up CPU, for example on mine right now there are only FireFox which fluctuates betwene about 0-30 which is normal. If anything is above 80 or 90 and you aren't actively using it, you should investigate that. I've installed some things that work fine, but then out of nowhere will freeze up (in the background, you dont notice) and start sucking up the CPU and my computer will slow to a crawl. This could slow your internet down.

Don't worry about SYSTEM IDLE PROCESS.. it just tells you how much FREE CPU you have, ie what's not benig used. The number should be quite high.

This might not be the problem, and it probably isn't, but it's a good thing to check just incase and could identify some virus or spyware that escaped your scan.

Make sure you have about 1gb atleast of free hard disk space. When I go below 500 my computer slows down.


Try defragging regularly as well, there are software out there to Defrag every night and there may be a noticeable speed increase, there was for me.

Registry cleaners don't seem to help my computer, and sometimes they mess things up. I don't use them nor trust them anymore but some people think they work great. It's up to you there.

It may just be your internet being used by something you're not aware of. I don't know if you have broadband but I have dialup and there are blinking lights on my task bar whenever my internet/modem is being used. Exit out of anything you use suchas Browsers, Web messengers, etc and anything that you know uses the internet. Your modem lights should not be blinking very much. If they are, you may have something slowing things down. Could be anti virus updating in the background, could be a virus/spyware (worst case). I often use this quick little check when websites are loading slower than usual.

A great thing to recommend for speeding up your computer is reformatting it and starting over. It might take some work re-installing all your things, but there's probably no better way to fix things up. I find that computers just get slow as they get older, it may be because of the accumulation of junk in the registry I'm not sure but reformatting usually brings the computer back to the speed it was like when you got it.


If you are unsure whether hte problem is your computer or the website, you could always try other websites, there are some that can check your internet speed if you search on google for them.

Good luck speeding up your pc

 

 

 

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

You seem to have enough ram for normal computer use with win xp. You should be fine, but there are some stuff that may slow you down.

Get a anti-spy/adware program. Antivirus programs don't usually protect well enough against spy- and adware so get one of these. When you enter a site, the unwanted software gathers information and sends it to a remote server, which leaves less bandwidth and resources to load the site.

YOUR BROWSER. Make sure you have a good browser up to date(not MS Internet Explorer crap, more like firefox, chrome or opera browsers). I have noticed it takes a long time to load some sites with IE.

Or maybe your internet speed has reduced. This can occur if your ISP is under traffic or the ISP doesn't provide the bandwidth it promised to you. Notice it can also be that the sites are heavy to load. Many news sites are even heavier 1 MB. Another cause for lack of speed is that you have other programs using internet, so there's less BW available for the browser.

That's all I got, hope I helped.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

If the slowdown really is linked to specific sites or even browsing the internet in general, I can think of a couple possible issues.  

1. Your browser is using lots of memory and forcing your computer to use the hard disk like memroy - Bring up task manager and check not only the CPU usage of programs but the memory usage as well.  Check the memory usage of your browser before your computer starts to slow down and keep note of the number.  If that number is much higher after the slowdown or it is very high relative to your other programs, then the problem might be that the websites are using a large amount of memory.  If you use Internet Explorer, try another browser with better memory management such as Opera, Firefox, or Chrome.

2. Your antivirus might be scanning web pages - If you have antivirus software such as Norton, it may be running browser protection scans on the sites you are going to.  If so, you could turn off this feature.  Also, if you use Norton 360 and have the backup overlay icons feature turned on, turn it off.  (It makes my powerhouse of a computer act like a computer from the 90's trying to run Vista. )

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

Like Rob said processes usually tell you what is using up the most memory and what not, however, from looking at your specs it has to be your computer. RAM degrades over time and so it is usually good to replace it ever couple of years to have some fresh stuff that will help speed up your computer. Another suggestion would be to increase the amount of RAM on your computer and for your specs usually 2GB of RAM is plenty. As for defragging, that will definitely help programs that I suggest is Defraggler as that will give it a good cleaning, also I would recommend that you run either Spybot or SuperAntiSpyware to help clean your system up as well. Since most of the time Malware, spyware and various other wares will bog down the system and so running one of those programs would clean up any that is there.

As for registry cleaners, it really depends on how frequent you do it and if your cleaning your registry once a week you might not see a difference, but if you clean it out ever six months or once a year you might tell the difference. Two programs I suggest is Glary Utility or CCleaner to clean out your registry and you might see an improvement. Also, you should uninstall any software you never use anymore as that could slow down your system as well. Of course, the ultimate way to speed up your computer again is to reinstall the operating system, by doing that you clean out all hte problems that might cause your system to slow down. Usually you want to reinstall your operating system at least once a year if this computer is being in heavy use.

Hopefully the suggestions that have been mention in previous posts and what I have mention will help speed up your computer.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

I have your best solution, better than all this mumbo jumbo.

It is all Saint Michael's spam which is slowing down your computer. It all makes sense.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

Leave it to the shoutbox, guys.
Do what they said, also do a virus scan to see if you have no weird hidden processes because sometimes, some processes don't appear on Task Manager and they can spend a lot of RAM.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

many things can make a computer slow, when a computer is slow at startup (when you turn it on) it can be caused by several things, one of them which can be that you are running many processes

such as you have programs set to start up when you turn on your computer, such as messenger, and or those annoying warnings, telling you to register a program etc

another thing is that you might be running way too many programs at the same time

another one, hello, viruses, trojans etc, run virus scans frequently!

although it mostly isnt the case, your computer might be running low on memmory... this mostly happens in older computers or in computers filled with movies and mp3s, easy fix is to buy an external harddrive or memmory and store things outside your computer.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

When we install an application it creates registry entries in Windows Registry, but when we remove these applications they generally do not delete all the entries created by them. Thus making Windows Registry full of garbage and reducing system's performance. So it become necessary to delete such entries regularly to make system run fast. Since it is very difficult to manually identify such entries so it is better to use software for cleaning registry. One such software is Regseeker and its a freeware.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

Another thing that no one seemed to have mentioned is network traffic. Are you getting your Internet directly from the cable/DSL modem, or on a wireless router? If it's a wireless router, did you secure your network with a WEP/WPA key or utilize MAC filtering to keep others from leeching your bandwidth? We're all guilty of it at some point or another, and that's usually the case when you experience slowdowns with your Internet speed. Something could have also affected the way or speed that you transfer data packets, like malware or an "update" from Windows (which you can fix using LvlLord's Event 4226 TCP/IP patch). It could also be your antivirus, as someone mentioned, scanning web sites as it loads content. (Never heard of it actually actively scanning what you access on the web, but then again, it may be a new thing.) Your browser could be at fault too if it actually interprets code slower... which is why you'll be hearing lots of jargon involving Javascript engines and rendering speeds with each browser. If you already have a high-speed connection, you won't see much in that aspect, but if things are nearer with 56K death, you probably and most likely will see a difference with that feature. (Take a look at Opera's Turbo feature, which caches web site content and loads it directly from the hard drive instead of requesting redundant data.) And of course, you can always put some blame on your ISP...

Most of what people mentioned with registry cleaning, defragmentation, and whatnot involves the speed and efficacy of the system itself and not so much on the network or your bandwidth, although it never hurts to pick up after your computer and make it run better, faster, and cleaner.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)