Reasons For Slow Computer Performance

Who doesn’t like unwinding on a weekend? I know, I for sure like to sit back and relax, catch a movie, but this weekend I was feeling a bit on the edge! I wanted to try my hand at something new; actually I was dying to get my hands on my cousin’s old laptop! No! I’ m not a kleptomaniac! I didn’t want to steal her laptop. Actually ever since I cured my office computer, I have been itching to try my new found expertise on another computer!

And for a long time I have heard my cousin complain about her laptop and its slow speed. And, if all of you would remember, one of the symptoms of a computer being infected with a virus was that it became slow.  So I was leaving for my cousin’s house with a spring in my step, all ready to dazzle everyone with my new found knowledge on how to make your PC work better.

Well you all might be wondering why my cousin would not give her laptop for repairs to the authorised service centre. Well for starters warranty on her laptop was over and it is indeed expensive to get a laptop repaired from the dealer without a warranty.  Also, her laptop model was old, the spares would be difficult to find and the local dealer would have to source from somewhere else. All of this would take time and my cousin’s work would suffer if she gave away her laptop for a couple of days.

So having learnt my lesson well, the first thing I did was to check her laptop for viruses. I was grateful to know that my cousin was smart; she had invested in a reliable and trusted virus scanner.  After scheduling a quick scan, we got to find out that the laptop was not inflected with any viruses! My cousin looked relieved, but got confused with the look of dismay on my face. Ideally I should have been happy, that there was no virus! To tell you the truth, my knowledge of fixing computers was limited to my new expert area-Virus removal. I was in a fix; my one shot at glory was gone! It looked like the laptop had a serious problem, one which was out of my league.

Never a person to give up easily! I decided to approach the one thing that would give me an answer: online search engine! I typed in the query and waited for the computer screen to start showing me the result!  Contrary to what I thought, being infected with a virus is not the only reason why a computer becomes slow. A computer’s performance is affected if it is overloaded with programs, affected with adware& spyware, has hardware issues and maybe even a damaged operating system.

This piece of information was a little too much for me to handle, all the while I was thinking, that even though the problem was tough, I would be able to solve it!  Let alone solving the problem, I was completely clueless about what plagued her computer.  Of all the issues listed, I only knew that a virus was not responsible for her computers slow performance. This bit of good news meant that I would have to search online on each issue and then only would I find out the real reason behind the laptop’s slow speed.

Let me stop writing now and I will leave the answers to what was wrong with my cousin’s computer for my next entry.