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Alan Danbury - PC Support

Common Problems

My PC is running very slowly

Symptoms

Over the last few weeks/months, your PC has become slower and slower.

Cause

During this period, you may have installed a number of new applications. In some cases, these may duplicate existing applications, or be replacements, but did you remove the old application first?

Another issue may be that you really have too many things running at the same time. 

Solution

Look at the System Tray ( those icons in the bottom right hand corner). Let your mouse hover over each one, do you recognise the program name? is it something that you use regularly, or only very occasionally?

There will be a number of programs that need to run, e.g. Anti Virus software, perhaps a printer interface, but how many are " a little useful thing that I picked up". Each one is taking up memory, and potentially slowing other programs down.

Critically review each of these programs and decide how many you actually need. If they are starting up automatically, you can control this. Microsoft provide a tool called MSCONFIG in Windows 9x, ME and XP, which shows you what is set to start, and lets you turn it off if not required. This way you can experiment to ensure that you really don't need these extra programs.

Press "Start/Run" and type in "msconfig". A screen should come up. Select the "Startup" tab, and it will show you all the programs that are being run automatically. Untick those which you think that you do not need, and reboot your PC. If you are not sure, try one program at a time and see what the impact is. Once you have finally decided what to prevent from running automatically, you can highlight the entry, and press Delete. This will remove them permanently from your Startup, although the programs will still be installed and can be run from the "Start/Programs" menu if required.



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