Even if you’ve only had your new PC for a couple of months, you could already be experiencing slower performance – from startup to browsing, and even shutdown. How does this happen and what can you do about it. Many people think that they just have to live with it and are prepared to wait until the darned thing stops working before they try and fix it. This article focuses on the causes of reduced performance of relatively new PCs but it could certainly apply to older PCs as well. Older PCs can have many more causes of reduced performance and I will address those issues in a future article.

Your PC may be only a few months old and you’ve taken the time to make sure you have updated antivirus and antispyware programs running. But it still seems to be slowing down. What happened and what can you do about it?

If you rule out Viruses, spyware and other malware, the degradation of a PC’s performance is usually caused by four things:
- Full and/or fragmented Hard Drive
- Errors in the Windows file system (Hard Drive Errors)
- Unnecessary or poorly written background processes
- Registry errors

Full and/or fragmented hard drive

Hard drives can fill up fast. If you have uploaded all your digital photos, as well as your audio and video files, you could be close to capacity. Let’s find out how full your hard drive is. From your Windows Explorer window, right-click on your C drive and then click on properties. You will see a graphical representation of your hard drive as in the image below.

If your hard drive has less than 10Gb of free space available, consider cleaning it up by deleting unused files or moving them to another hard drive. Likewise, if you have a 500Gb hard drive or larger and it is more than 90% full, consider a cleanup. One of the quickest and easiest ways to acquire additional storage space is to purchase an external hard drive. The price for a 500Gb external hard drive has fallen to below $100 (USD) from many online vendors. If you are a little more ambitious and understand the basics of PC maintenance and repair, an additional internal hard drive is another good option.

The fragmentation status of your hard drive has a great effect on data retrieval speed. When a hard drive writes data, it rarely puts the file in one contiguous space. It usually splits the file up into many fragments and has to remember where all the pieces are when it retrieves the file later. This method creates fragmented files. When too many files are so fragmented, the overall performance of the drive is degraded. Fortunately, there is a built-in program to de-fragment your hard drive. The Defrag utilities in the most recent versions of Windows are slightly different, but the end result is the same. In XP, the defrag utility presents itself with a graphical interface that gives you a visual feel for how fragmented your hard drive is. For Vista, Microsoft wanted to make the defrag utility more of a background process, so they stripped the graphical presentation and added the ability to better schedule automated defrag processes. Win7 defrag is similar to Vista except that it gives a little more info about the status of your drive. The image below shows the “Tools” tab of the same window we used above. The Defragmentation section of this window is the entry point for the defrag utility.

Whichever version of Windows you have, running defrag on a regular basis is one of the best ways to maintain good hard drive performance. After you set up an automated schedule, you may never have to deal with it again.

Before we move on, take another look at the first image above and notice the “Disk Cleanup” button next to the disk space pie chart. Clicking on this will cause your PC to analyze how much disk space can be recovered by deleting unnecessary files that have built up. These files include temporary internet files, recycle bin files, downloaded files, etc. After the PC has analyzed the potential files, it then displays them to you and asks if you want to delete them. You can check or uncheck the boxes next to the file types and continue, or cancel the whole process. This little cleanup utility is another easy way to perform maintenance on your hard drive.

Errors in the Windows file system (Hard Drive Errors)

Usually, hard drive errors won’t cause sluggish performance, but will cause your system to crash or not start up at all. Occasionally, errors on your hard drive can slow down your PC as it tries to read the data repeatedly. Hard drive errors can be caused by a defective hard drive or loss of power or power surge during the time the hard drive is writing data to the disk.

All versions of Windows have a utility to check the hard drive for errors. Look at the image above that shows the “Tools” tab. you will see a button for error checking labeled as “Check now…”. Clicking on this will bring up a dialog box that asks if you want to automatically fix errors and/or scan for bad sectors. Make sure that the first check box is checked and click the Start button. Windows won’t let you do an immediate scan of the system drive because it has many open files, so it will ask you if you want to schedule a scan to occur the next time you reboot. Click on the Schedule button, and then restart your system. During the startup process, your PC will take a slight detour and perform a scan of your hard drive. If there are few or no errors, it may only take 5 – 10 minutes, but if there are many errors, it could take 30 minutes or longer. If the scan found a few errors and successfully fixed them, you can safely use your PC, but run another scan in a few days to make sure that there are no further errors. If you find that you continually get errors during these scans, I would suspect the hard drive itself is defective.

Unnecessary or poorly written background processes

Background processes are programs that are running without any visual evidence, they are usually processes that handle print chores, antivirus monitoring and other important tasks, but can also be useless “helpers” that sit and wait for a certain event to take place such as opening a .pdf file or monitoring if a certain application has an updated version. Over time, even a relatively short period, especially if you download and install many applications, the number of the unnecessary background processes can grow to be a problem.

Fortunately, you can take control of the situation and stop these unwanted processes from loading. However, you have to be able to separate the good processes from the not-so-good. Let’s start by looking at the processes that are running on your PC.

The application we are going to use is what is known as a Windows Task Manager. Task Manager is an application that displays the processes and programs that are currently running. It also displays performance statistics based on the activity of the processes. As usual in Windows, there are several ways to start Task Manager. The easiest is to right click on any unused area of the task bar and select “Start Task Manager”. You can also use the “CTRL+ALT+DEL” keyboard combination to bring up a menu that has the Task Manager selection. Either way, you will then be presented with a window that is similar to this one:

Select the “Processes” tab and make sure that you are showing processes from all users by checking the box at the bottom left (this checkbox may be a button when you first open Task Manager.) You are now seeing a “real-time” representation of what your PC is doing. The processes are contained in the “Image Name” column. The next column shows who or what “owns” the process. The CPU column displays a number that is the current percentage of CPU time that the process is getting. The next column shows the amount of memory that the process is using, and the last column is a description of the process. If you click on the column heading name, the table will perform a sort based on that column. Click it again and the sort will reverse. Since we are dealing with how much CPU time each process is getting, we need to sort by the CPU column. The first time you click on it, it will perform a sort from least to most usage. You will need to click on it again to sort from most to least. This will result in the process with the most CPU usage on the top.

Remember that the Task Manager is a real-time representation of what your PC is doing, so the data in the list is constantly changing. A “normally” running PC should have at the top of the list a process titled “System Idle Process.” It shows how much idle time the CPU has and its normal CPU percentage can vary between 90%-99%. Lots of idle time is good, so if it stays below 90% for more than several seconds or more, you have processes that are consuming large amounts of CPU time. Since we sorted the list by CPU, you can see the processes that are consuming the most CPU time at the top. Don’t bother looking at processes that continually show 0% CPU time, but make a note of the processes that are consuming lots of CPU time. Are they good or bad?

Fortunately there is a resource that will help determine the “good” processes from the “bad.” Head on over to www.tasklist.org and you can research each of your processes and determine its value. If you can’t find it on this list, just do a google search on the process name. Your research will lead to your determination of the value of the processes so that you can make a decision as to whether you want to terminate them or not.

Your next step is to actually stop the process from running, but before you proceed, make sure that anything you are working on is saved because you may have to reboot your PC. At the bottom right of the Task Manager window is a button labeled “End Process” that allows us to terminate processes. Highliting a process and clicking on this button will cause the PC to attempt to terminate the process. Most of the time the process will end, but some system processes are so critical to the core of the OS that they won’t terminate. You will use trial and error to determine the results of terminating these processes. After you terminate a process, use your PC for a bit to see if there was any change in performance. Terminate one process at a time until there are no more processes that are consuming CPU time. If at any time your PC locks up, you may have to press the reset button or the power button to restart it.

We’re not done yet, because these processes will start right back up when you reboot your PC. Don’t despair, we have a solution for that. But first, when you were doing your research on the processes, did you find that the processes were related to a program that you recently installed? If so, you can decide to simply uninstall the program. Otherwise, Microsoft has a System Configuration utility known as MSCONFIG that allows you to pick and choose which processes can run at startup. I’ll be writing a separate article soon with instructions on MSCONFIG, so until then, there is an excellent, detailed article here:

• Use MSCONFIG for Faster Start-up in Windows XP

Registry errors

The Windows registry is a system database that stores settings and options for the operating system. It contains information that establishes and defines operating parameters for hardware, software and user specific settings. The registry contains thousands of these settings and can be difficult to comprehend. Extreme caution needs to be taken when attempting to modify the data because one mistake can corrupt your Windows installation.

When errors appear in the registry, they can cause slow startup and sluggish performance. Errors can even cause a system to not work at all. Errors can appear in the registry from many sources such as poorly written applications and uninstall scripts or loss of power during registry updates.

Although it is possible to modify the registry manually, there are many software utilities that do the hard work for you. These utilities, known as Registry Cleaners, search out errors in the registry and make appropriate modifications which can result in marked inprovement in performance. Of the many Registry Cleaners available, I have found that “WinASO Registry Optimizer” does a good job and is easy to use.

Summary

After following the steps outlined in this article, your PC should show signs of improvement. The four reasons for sluggish performance are the main reasons, but not all of them. Other reasons for a slow PC can be faulty hardware, bad device drivers or defective memory. Additionally, the operating system could have become corrupt, but this condition is difficult to diagnose.

If your PC is still sluggishly slow, your next step will probably have to be a complete re-install of the operating system. This is fairly easy to do, but I will cover it completely in another article. Also, a future article will discuss the necessary steps in troubleshooting older PCs.

/doc