Every week I’m out making my rounds, I hear this expression; “My computer is really slow it must have too much stuff in it and needs to be cleaned out.”
Your computer can never have have too much “stuff.” Your hard drive is designed to hold tens of thousands of documents, pictures, music and more. The number of files you store on your computer has next to nothing to do with your perceived speed of the computer.
Computer speed directly relates to how much RAM (temporary memory, not storage/hard drive memory) it has, how fast the processor is, and most importantly how clean your computer is. By clean, I’m referring to physically clean and what types of files are stored on the system.
Computers that accumulate too much dust and grime on the motherboard or vents will suffer from slow downs because the computer is battling heat problems and can’t perform to its maximum. Make sure you open your computer’s case and blow out the dust and grime periodically. Smokers…this goes triple for you because the filth that a cigarette generates is thicker and tarrier and coats electronics attracting even more dust and grime like fly paper. If you can’t quit smoking for your own health, at least do it for your computer’s health or smoke outside.
The second type of cleanliness is the type of files being saved on your computer. Every time; we use our computers for anything, small files are created behind the scenes that we can’t see. Sometimes programmers will write code that deletes these files when they are no longer needed, but often times not. These temporary files stack up over time and can affect performance because of their small size and voluminous nature. Use the Windows Disk Cleanup utility at least monthly to keep these files to a minimum. Better yet, download Steven Gould’s CleanUp utility and use it.
It might seem contradictory to my argument earlier that our computers were meant to hold stuff, but it has to be the right kind of stuff…your stuff.
The third type of cleanliness relates to whether or not viruses and spyware have attacked your system. If so, then you can have serious problems and computer slowness. If this might be the case, search this site for SCD (Slow Computer Disease) or spyware and follow the recommendations we outline.
Lastly, you might also need to consider increasing your temporary memory or RAM. Click here for a video tip that shows you exactly how to do this.
