There's quite a few reasons why this could be, so we'll go through them one by one:
It's possible that you have got too many background programs running that are using up all of your memory. Have a look at the system tray, in your start menu beside your clock, are there lots of icons that you don't recognise? This section's for you. If you've had your computer for a while, the chances are there's been loads of programs that have been installed in the past and then forgotten about. If you go to My Computer > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs then you can have a look at all the programs you've installed - with the option to uninstall them.
It is also a good idea to regularly defragment your hard drive. Don't worry, it's easy and requires pretty much no effort from you. Just go to My Computer, right click on your hard drive and go to Properties, click on the Tools tab and then click on Defragment Now. It might be worth Analysing first, to check if your hard drive needs defragmenting. If this is the first time in months (or even years) that you've done this, it could take a few hours to complete the process, but after the first time it'll be fairly quick depending on how often you do it. Fragmentation is a natural problem which occurs on every computer. What happens, is when you use your hard drive to create, delete, move or edit files, in the background, your computer needs to store your file in pieces scattered across the drive. This isn't obvious to the user, but it can slow down your computer when it needs to search through different parts of the drive to put together a file. The defragmenting process basically tidies things up!
Another reason for a slow computer might be hardware related - do you know how much memory your computer has? The more memory it has - the more programs it can run. To check your memory, go to My Computer > Control Panel > System. Under the General Tab, it'll tell you how much RAM (random access memory) you have. Anything below 256Mb is pretty poor. Don't worry though, you can upgrade your memory, but you'll need to check your motherboard's specs. before you know exactly what memory to buy. Check out our section on
installing your RAM.
Spyware could also be a problem. If you're getting random pop-ups, home page hijacks, browser helper objects, then please check out our
Spyware section.
