Some might think that something is wrong with their PCs due to the slow speed they experience. Working on a slow computer is no fun at all and lowers your productivity. Many factors may cause a laggy computer, one of the most important is aging.
Like humans, computers grow old and become slow-motion over time. However, unlike humans, levels of performance decline not as a result of fatigue and exhaustion from working for long years, but rather the operating systems, programs, applications, and services that develop over time and become more complex and denser; thus, they need more hardware resources.
That is why you need to upgrade your PC’s hardware, such as increasing RAM, purchasing a fast SSD storage solution, or upgrading the CPU and graphics card. In some cases, we may have to replace the entire computer due to the inability to upgrade its components, as we do with laptops, for example.
However, your computer may still be in its prime, and have the latest hardware, and yet it feels strangely slow while using it. In this case, surely something is wrong with the way you use it. In this article, we will highlight a set of the most common mistakes that always cause your computer to crash and, in the worst-case scenario, drive it to break down completely.
1-Running Too Many Programs at Once
Well, although this point needs a long illustration, it explains itself. Unless you are familiar enough with how to handle computer programs and maintenance, you may have no idea how to check your PC to find out programs running in the background all the time.
Over time, you have probably installed dozens of desktop programs. The biggest issue comes from programs setting themselves to automatically run in the background. This means that they are not only consuming the Internet bundle but also eating up computer resources at the same time, such as the central processor and RAM. Therefore, if you don’t have enough free space RAM, this will lead to your computer slowing down.
To combat this, look at the list of running programs icons next to the time & date in the taskbar. If you have many of them that you don’t use anymore, just close them immediately. You may have to click the small up arrow to view the list of programs running in the background.
The next, more important step, is to check which programs are running every time you boot up. Open the task manager by clicking on the taskbar with the right mouse button and from the menu choose the Task Manager option. From there, switch to the Startup tab and you’ll see everything set to run when you log into Windows.
Take a look at what’s here, and stop the programs by clicking on the application icon with the right mouse button and then choose the first option “Disable”. Do the same to disable any programs that do not need to immediately run upon booting your PC. In this way, you are helping to free up a large amount of RAM memory to be ready to deal with your other business software.
2- Forgetting to Reboot Regularly
Just remember this tip and be sure that you will not regret it. Restarting regularly is important even if you’re not troubleshooting an active issue. You might be tempted to never turn your computer off so that you can quickly resume where you left off next time, but this is a bad idea with Windows computers.
The main benefit of restarting from a performance standpoint is that doing so flushes your RAM and erases all the processes and programs that take up a lot of space. If any programs you run have a memory leak (meaning that they eat up a large amount of RAM while they are running in the background), restarting will fix that.
In addition, Windows also installs system updates, which can fix performance issues, and these updates necessarily require a restart in order to install them correctly. Thus, you need to restart your computer regularly to apply these updates and also to free up RAM space. In most cases, you don’t need to reboot every night, aiming to restart your PC a few times per week will suffice.
3- Reckless Clicking Without Thinking
Did you know that many websites are a “minefield” of harmful content? In fact, these websites only aim to exploit the victim by offering some expensive pirated files for free. So as soon as you click on download this program or file on your computer, you will get surprised at how slow your computer will be because your computer actually has been infected with a malicious virus.
Moreover, many scam emails try to impress you with lots of rewards. Just remember when browsing any spam that wants to redirect you to external sites, it can be just a trap to infect your device with viruses and steal your personal accounts. Therefore, in short, be careful and think thoroughly before you click on the “Download” button, especially when browsing untrusted sites.
