Why Is My PC So Slow?!

There are two main reasons that a PC loses its optimum performance capability: heat and clutter on the hard drive.

Heat - As PCs have become more powerful, they naturally generate more heat. The manufacturers have made every attempt to implement cooling systems into the PC in order to minimize the ill-effects of heat. Aluminum heat sinks attached to the CPU chip dissipate the heat, then fans blow the heat out of the case. Air circulating through the case is a very important part of the cooling system.

Unfortunately, in addition to air, the fans also pull dust through the case. This dust clogs up the fans of the heat sink and also reduces the amount of air flowing through the case. This reduces the efficiency of the cooling system, and therefore reduces performance.

Hard drive clutter - The hard drive has always been the slowest component of a PC. Although there have been many improvements in recent years to make hard drives faster, they still don't compare with the speeds of modern CPUs and RAM.

The limitation is based on how a hard drive works. Data is stored on platters that spin on a motor and a series of read/write heads have to move in and out locating that data and putting it in the correct sequence to make sense of it.

Clutter on your hard drive makes this process even slower because there is more junk to sort through in order to get to the useful data. This will drastically affect the performance of your PC.

Click here for 'before' and 'after' pictures.

Tags: pc running slow, Cleaning a PC, PC overheating