Transcription of the Video:
Hey everyone! Welcome to “How to Fix Your Slow Windows PC Computer.” My name is Dave Glick owner of Glick’s Mobile Computer Repair and Business I.T. Services right here in Phoenix Arizona. We will be discussing the most common causes for a slow computer and how to fix them. We will not get into malware or viruses at this time because there is not enough time here for that content. However, we will provide that information in another video.
I hope you’re looking forward to some good information on how to fix a slow computer and I am ready to give that information to you.
So to start out with. Why does a computer get slow? It can get slow for a lot of reasons. One of them is because as the computer works it builds up a lot of temporary files over the course of time and it puts those files not only in the windows temp folder there but also in a special temporary folder in your profile in Windows and guess what? Those files never go away. So you can get thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of temporary files on your computer that actually slows your computer down because Windows has to go through and figure out what files it needs when you make a request and when you have all those hundreds of thousands of files on the computer it’s more that it has to sift through in the index to figure out what file you actually need at that time.
Another reason that a computer can be very slow and a lot of people tell me “Well my computers really slow,” what they really mean is the computer is really slow on the Internet. A big cause of that is because people just browse and browse and browse and browse and browse and as you browse the computer is downloading all these little files in the cache and again thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of files will end up in the cache and it never gets cleaned up. Those files whenever the browser is looking or goes to a web page and it’s looking for pictures on that web page it’s looking through that cache and if it can’t find the pictures from the cache then it goes and downloads them. So you can imagine that if you have just a few files in your cache that it goes through that process pretty quickly but if it has hundreds of thousands of files in that cache it can be really really really super slow.
The first thing that you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to download and install Ccleaner if you don’t already have it on the computer. You can get that from a site called piriform.com. So we go to Piriform and we click on the free download. And we click on download. And we’re going to run that download. We’re going to go ahead and click on install here and it installs Ccleaner. We can run it right from here or we can run it from our start menu. We will go ahead and run it here.
I strongly recommend that you just leave the defaults as it is. And then we can go ahead and click on analyze and see what’s there. It’s saying hey Internet Explorer needs to be close will click yes. And as you can see it comes up with the cache from Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer – Temporary Internet Files so I am going to go ahead and run Ccleaner. And you can see that I don’t have a whole lot of files built up at this point in time. But that’s OK I just want to show you how to use this so I’m going to go ahead and run Ccleaner right here.
We click OK we want to really delete those files. And it’s done in a very short period of time. Ccleaner does a really nice. Job in a really short period of time another really nice thing about Ccleaner is it’s not too aggressive and it’s not under aggressive either and pretty much does the right amount of cleaning for computer. So it’s kind of like the Goldilocks tale you know this bed’s is too big this bed is too small this bed is about right well it’s kind of like that. That’s why a lot of technicians recommend Ccleaner and we recommend that you just leave it at the default settings – so now that we’ve cleaned that up we’re going to go ahead and move to the next thing.
So we’ve cleaned up our browsers; we’ve cleaned up windows that’s what Ccleaner does. We’re going to go ahead and start our Task Manager (right-click the Taskbar, left-click Start Task Manager). The Task Manager gives us a lot of great information about how the computer is running right now. You can see that we have our C.P.U. usage and our memory usage right here. These are very very very important metrics. When the CPU usage gets up to and at one hundred percent for periods of time it means that the computer is stretched out. It can’t do anything more than what you have it doing so if you open up another another program while you do your C.P.U. usage is up so high, the computer actually has to allocate the resources. It has to say OK well we’re going to give this amount of time to this program this amount of time to this program this amount of time to this program.
So if your computer, your CPU usage on your computer is very high all the time that would be a very good reason why your computer is so slow. In order to get this back down to a reasonable amount, like probably you know under sixty percent or fifty percent and you can see right now they’re running at eighteen to twenty, fifteen to twenty in that area. In order to get it down to under fifty percent you’re going to need to close some programs you’re going to need to figure out which programs are using the CPU time and I’ll show you that in just a minute.
The next thing that we want to talk about is the memory usage so the memory usage is never going to go up to one hundred percent however it will get close. Once you get up past seventy five to eighty percent of memory usage, Windows really starts allocating memory between the physical memory and the virtual memory which is hard drive space so your part of your hard drive is actually being used for your memory usage. The bad news is is that hard drive read and write times and seek times are much slower than physical memory. As your memory usage gets up to around eighty eighty five ninety percent, Windows is stuffing more of that physical memory requirement into the virtual memory which again is much slower. That’s why your computer slows down a lot. Again you need to figure out which programs are using up all that memory and either close those programs or if it’s a browser close a bunch of tabs etc etc.
This is the performance to which by the way if you don’t see these tabs right away especially in Windows 10, there is a little button here that will say it’s labeled Show More or something to that effect go ahead and click on that button and then you’ll see these tabs in there. This is the performance tab it also shows your physical amount of memory that you have installed on the computer how much is in the cache which is essentially memory that is being allocated but it’s not being used necessarily and how much is available and how much is actually free, free is just not even, it’s not being used at all it’s not cached nothing. It also shows you a bunch of other numbers that really don’t mean a whole heck of a lot (to you) although your up time is a very good thing because it shows you the number of days hours minutes and seconds that your computer’s been up. So if you have a Windows computer and it’s been up for longer than a few days it’s a good time to restart and that’s a really good other reason why a computer would be really super slow.
So we’re going to go ahead and go to the processes tab here and I’m going to click on the CPU heading so that it sorts by CPU This is the time that as a percentage that each particular process is taking of the CPU. Your CPU only has so much available processing time at any one time so if all of your processes are using a total of one hundred percent there is no more to give so here’s where we find out which processes are using how much and you can see that these numbers don’t add up to one hundred percent. The reason is because by default in the process establishes does not show you processes that are being used so we’re going to go ahead and click on “Show processes from all users.”
Now we have a really good approximation of everything that’s being used. The system idle process here I get asked a lot about and it is the CPU time that is not being used as a percentage so it’s it’s fluctuating here as you can see between about seventy five and eighty five percent. And then we have our recording program here we have some other processes that are using the CPU time. No big deal because we still have a lot of processing time available to us. However, if you’re up around one hundred percent you know eighty eighty five ninety nine percent you’re going to want to find out which processes are using all that CPU time. Here we can see which ones are using all of our CPU time.
I want to show you something else. Your browsers a lot of times when you have say Google Chrome open and you have multiple tabs like this you’re going to have a bunch of Chrome processes. You’re also going to have a bunch of svchost processes. This is perfectly normal. OK? See all these processes here since I’ve open Chrome and I’ve added more tabs this is the way the Chrome operates it’s perfectly OK to have all those Chrome processes there it’s not going to hurt anything. OK back to discussing why our computer would be so slow. We’ve cleaned the temporary files both on the computer and in the browsers. We’ve looked at the task manager and we’ve determined that our CPU usage is not too high. And we’ve determined that we have plenty of memory left. OK? Well why else would our computer be so slow?
Well first we need to determine whether or not it’s the whole computer that’s really slow or if it’s only when we’re on the internet. If it’s only when we’re on the Internet cleaning up the browser cache should have taken care of the problem. However it could also be that your router or your modem is having a problem or could be a service issue. All right but if you are computer overall is slow – starting up shutting down, using any kind of program not just the internet. One very possible cause for that is the fact that your hard drive is going bad. This is if there is no other reason why you could possibly think of that your computer would be so slow. It’s very very possible that your hard drive is just going bad. In that particular case you’re going to want to make sure that your data is backed up and the more important that your data is, the more places that you want to have it. Lesson number one: make sure that your important data is always backed up OK? Lesson number two: the more important your data is to you like your family’s pictures etc If they’re only on one computer and nothing else you will want to back up that data not just to one device but to multiple devices. We never ever trust just one device to carry our data.
That’s it for today thank you so much for watching! I hope that this has been very helpful to you please call us at any time on the number on your screen and we are happy to answer any questions and help you in any way that we can. I hope you’re having a wonderful day! Thank you again from Dave Glick, Glick’s Mobile Computer Repair and Business IT Services in Phoenix Arizona.