Despite the availability of adequately fast processor with reasonably low price, many people are still asking why their computers are running so slowly. In fact, even a state of the art computer could actually become very sluggish due to improper software and hardware implementations. Eventually, things on the interface stuck and everything moves so slowly. This is a good time to admit that there’s something really wrong with our computer. It would be a good time to reassess how many programs we have in our computer. Sluggishness could happen when we have too many background programs that are automatically loaded when the computer starts. The most obvious thing to do is to consider whether we really need those programs in our computer.
We should check programs that are running behind the scenes or on the background. The most common programs that run in the background are antivirus software. It needs to be ready all the time to monitor suspicious activities and catch an incoming virus before it infects the whole system. These antiviral solutions are essential and it is not recommended to remove them. However, we may also have additional security programs, such as firewall and anti ads software.
We should consider whether we really need them. As an example, we should be able to choose to activate them at specific situations, but not automatically when the computer is turned on, especially when we are not connected with the Internet. All these problems really come down to one fact: Do we have enough system memory or RAM?
Many people have at least 4GB or 8GB of RAM in the system, some also 16GB of RAM needed for high performance utilizations. In general, we will experience sluggishness when memory utilization has reached 90 percent or higher. While hard disk can be seen as a long-term memory, RAM is essentially short-term memory for our computer.
All data in RAM will disappear when the computer is turned off and we also tend to forget much of our short-term memory as time passes. We also experience problem when we are loaded with so much information that we are overwhelmed to remember everything. This is the same situation when our computer runs out available space in RAM. The most efficient way is to reduce the amount of information that needs to be processed, such as unnecessary background program and closing high-resource programs.
We could go to Windows Task Manager and open the Performance tab. This should allow us to monitor RAM usage in real time. It is a good time to perform an experiment by running the computer at typically high-resource performance, such as when we run favourite 3D games or large productivity software, like video editing. After performing the usual daily task, we could check the peak RAM utilization. If the amount of RAM used has reached 90 percent or higher, then it is a good time to buy additional RAM module. We should see huge boost in performance.