my computer is very slow, how can i possibly identify its problem?

Answer 1

there r many solutions fr this many side problem .u defragment ur comp every month or u put the most minimun number of icons on ur desktop,reduce ur softwares shotcuts that r in ur system tray,when u try 2 remove games from ur system better uninstall then rather than just deleting then and run antivirus scans occasionaly

Answer 2

run the disc cleanup, it's on the accessories/system tools menu. then go back there again and this time "defragment" your hard drive. also, you may want to check the automatic program run menu. click start/run/then type in msconfig. make sure things like AIM, ares, quicktime, real player, etc aren't automatically running everytime your computer starts. also, if you have "wallpaper" on your desktop, that's one of the main things that will slow a computer down. just have a blue wall as your desktop. it's boring i know, but it's worth it! also, you may want to make sure your "cookies" are empty.

Lastly, if you don't have "ad-aware" and "spy-bot" programs, get them. There are free trial versions on the internet that do the job just fine. Make sure you always update these programs. I'd try doing all of this once a week or every other week at the most, for the best results with your computer. sometimes i get very lazy and slack off, and i suffer the consequences. lastly, make sure windows always has the latest updates. click "start, then way up top, there should be a "windows update." click there if your computer isn't set to automatically find updates.

Answer 3

Using registry cleaner can fix your computer and then make your computer faster,Why?the reason is that there are some regsitry errors and remnant,corrupt files and temp files in your computer to cause "computer slow".
Everytime you install and uninstall software on your computer and surfing online you create junk in the computer registry.over time, the registry can grow to enormous proportions, especially if the various programs you've installed do not do a good job of deleting and/or updating it's Registry entries.You need to scan and clean your computer with registry cleaner to make it fast.Good Regisry Cleaner will improve your computer and Internet performance dramatically!It even can speed up your computer by 300% or more!
There are some comparison and review of TOP 5 registry cleaners.

http://www.****************************

You can download and scan your computer for free.

Answer 4

There are many things that could be wrong. Your computer could use more RAM. You might try defragging your hard drive. You could drop your temp files and clear the Windows cache. These are only a few possibilities. You might also have a virus or trojan. In this case, you could get a good virus scanner and try to remove it. Finally, your drive could just be running out of space. You can get hard drives these days for little money. Good luck.

Answer 5

there are a lot of things that can be wrong you can go to http://www.mypcfixes.com once there click on slow pc's on the right hand side there are many things there listed you can do to try and speed it up. I use this sight often it has a lot of useful information for that and other problems. Hope this helps

Answer 6

One thing you can do is start closing non-essential programs
on at a time to see if it speeds up. This is especially usefull
if you have an older computer without enought ram. Also
cleaning up your hard drive can help speed up the access time.

Answer 7

Hey,
A good tool I used to clean up and speed up my PC is CCleaner. You can download it for free here http://bitly.com/1sW2j5Z
It's surely the leader program of its type

Answer 8

Here are some tips to help your system run better. Most spyware/malware/trojen removing software just sucks.

Here’s a quick run down from Download.com:
With the ability to scan your RAM, Registry, hard drives, and external storage devices for known data-mining, advertising, and tracking components, Ad-Aware SE easily can clean your system, allowing you to maintain a higher degree of privacy while you surf the Web. Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition boasts a number of improvements. Extended memory scanning now scans all modules loaded by a process. Scanning uses the all- new CSI (Code Sequence Identification) technology to identify new and unknown variants of known targets. Extended Registry scanning now scans Registry branches of multiple-user accounts and performs additional smart checks to detect dynamically created references. Scanning speed is noticeably faster, and this version offers an Extended Scanning mode for known and unknown/possible browser hijackers.

Go download Ad-Aware Personal from here:
http://www.download.com/3000-2144-10045910.html

Press the “download now” link. If nothing pops up, then you’re using a pop up stopper and to by pass this you should press the “Ctrl” button on your key board. Now a file download box should pop up. Press “Run”. After installing the software, you will press “start” on the application. Be sure the “perform smart system scan” option is bubbled in. Now press “next”. Once it has scanned your system for possible hijackings, malware, spy ware and such, now its time to delete them. Press next. Place a check mark in all boxes except for the one labeled “MRU List” as this is not necessary to delete. Click OK and now you’re done.
*****************************
Now, if you have anti virus software, and you have viruses, you might want to consider changing to a better virus protection. If you paid for McAfee or Norton, sorry, it’s too bad, because you can go download Avast anti virus for free, and its way better. But you have to uninstall your old anti virus. Go to Start/Control panel/Add Remove programs, and uninstall the other one you have. Alot of people are saying to use AVG, but unless they have improved it, it used to be a resource hog, meaning slow your system dramatically.

Here’s a quick run down from Download.com:
Avast Home Edition is a complete ICSA certified and Secure Computing Magazine awarded antivirus software for home noncommercial use. Avast includes the following components: On Demand Scanner—with skinnable simple interface—just select what do you want to scan in which way and press the Play button; On Access Scanner—special providers to protect the most of available e-mail clients; Instant Messaging—ICQ, Miranda; Network traffic—intrusion detection—lightweight firewall; P2P protection for Kazaa, BitTorrent; Web shield—monitors and filter all HTTP traffic; NNTP Scanner—scans all Usenet Newsgroup traffic and all operations with files on PC; Boot Time Scanner—scans disks in the same way and in the same time as Windows CHKDSK does.

I have been using this program for about four years, and wouldn’t change if you paid me.
Here’s the link:
http://www.download.com/3000-2239-10019223.html

Go head and repeat last steps for downloading and installing this program too. Once you install it, the program will ask you if you want to run a boot scan and answer that with a YES. This boot scan scans your boot up for viruses and is a great tool. Here’s a quick rundown on how to run this antivirus:
Once it’s open, click on the icons to the right. First the one that looks like a hard drive, then the one that looks like a CD. Next, click on the one that looks like a folder and select the “My Computer” icon. Next click on the Icon on the left that is the letter A. This sets the sensitivity level, set it to high. Now press the PLAY button and it will scan you system, most likely finding Viruses your crappy anti virus never found.
***********************************
I know this is a long explanation, but I figured it was better than just telling you to go download these programs you never have used before, then you have to figure out how to use it, how annoying.

Once your done with this, go to your start menu. Go to Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools and then run the Disk Clean Up first, then once this is done, using the same method of finding disk cleanup, use your Disk Defragmenter.

Follow these steps if you haven’t already, and you will see a difference immediately. Now keep in mind, the computer wasnt slowed in five minutes, so dont expect to fix it in five minutes. You will have to have some patients in order to finish all of these step, but it is well worth it. I have more information that can help you like stopping programs that are unnecessarily running in the background and slowing your system down, the how to. Contact me via email, let me know how this worked out, and I will send a step by step instructions how to stop progs from running with out your knowledge in your configuration settings.

Good luck!

Answer 9

This detailed article will help you and others who will read this though it is longer. It helped me a lot.

Do computers suffer from obesity?
Remember the day when you bought your new PC with Windows installed? It was lightning fast. It took only about ten seconds to boot. When you opened the Start menu or the load/save file dialogs, they showed up instantly. But, after a year of heavy use, you now realize that your PC has some serious performance issues. It takes more and more time to boot each time you start it. When you open your Start menu, file dialogs or other Windows Shell powered components, also seem to always need more time. Your computer is grinding its hard disk for seemingly forever as if it was thinking whether you are worthy to see what you had hoped to see.

Modern computers are very complex systems. They are much like the human body. By consuming large amounts of non-certified products from unknown sources, you increase the level of cholesterol in your blood very quickly. Soon, you would have an obesity problem. You couldn't run fast either. This is the same reason why your computer slows down over time. The truth is that there are no certified software products for computers. All of the so-called software certificates can only guarantee the authenticity of a software product and not its quality. There are no PC medicine organizations that can certify software. Even large software companies produce software that may harm your system integrity and leave some "cholesterol" in your computer's veins. And, we won't even discuss the software from unknown vendors that you download from the Internet!

Unlike humans, computers may have many lives. All you need to do is to format your hard drive and install the system from scratch. However, this is not a good solution. By formatting your disks, you lose all your installed programs, preferences and system integrity. Is there another solution? If you need a personal medic for your computer to provide required treatment without killing the patient first, you may want to give Smart PC from Smart PC Solutions a try. It's an all-in-one medicine package for your system.

There are two versions, Personal and Professional. They differ only by the number of features available. I use the Professional version. Thus, I will guide you through its features. You will then be able to decide for yourself whether you need the Professional or the Personal version.

Back to the "cholesterol" problem. What is considered to be bad "cholesterol" for your PC and where are the veins? The Registry is your computer's blood system. All other organs rely on it. All the vital system information is stored in this unified database and all Windows applications poll this information. But, there is a downside. Normally, users log into their Windows with full administrator privileges. You need the administrator privileges in order to install new software and to configure your system and network settings. All the applications that you run receive full administrator privileges as well. This means that any program started by you can change almost any section of your Windows Registry, including the settings of other applications. This is how, for example, malicious scripts from the Internet change the Home and Se arch pages in your Internet Explorer. With the passing of time, even normal applications from reliable vendors leave some records in your Registry that may cause an "obesity" problem. Most computer programs never un-install completely! Users rarely complain about such issues and, as such, developers often ignore the problem. They don't seem to be worried about such things. No complaints - no problem. But this is a problem. After a year of heavy use, your Registry becomes really fat. It occupies more memory, and it takes longer for every application to access the Registry. This can reduce the performance of many applications and increase their start time. But, even worse is that some of the leftovers in your Registry point to non-existing or damaged objects. Here's an example: When you right-click on a file in Windows Explorer, a contextual menu pops up. It is called "contextual" because of the file type specific actions displayed in this menu. When you in stall a program, it may add its handlers into system menus like the menu that pops up for a file. You probably have some handlers there added by your image viewers ("Open with ..."), archives ("Send to..", "Compress with..."), printer drivers and more. If some of the Registry entries, like these, point to non-existing objects, Windows will try to find them every time. There are also some Registry sections that contain programs to run on Windows startup. They are not shown in the "Startup" section of your Start menu and you cannot remove them manually. Windows will try to start them on every boot.

Now, for the treatment. Get into a white doctor's uniform and run SmartPC, your scalpel. The interface is very easy to understand. Click the "Fix" button and you'll see two options available. Let's start with cleaning the Registry. In addition to fixing the problems described above, SmartPC will analyze and fix, or delete if necessary, broken links, device drivers, ActiveX components, fonts, un-install entries and more. As a result, you will have a compact and a fragment-free database without obsolete and broken entries, resulting in increased overall performance of your system.

Not all problems come from the Registry. There is a special type of file, known as a "shortcut". Your Desktop and the Start menu consist almost entirely of shortcuts. When you access your start menu or when your Desktop is loading, Windows searches for the target objects that are referenced by your shortcuts. When a shortcut contains a broken link, or points to a non-existing object, Windows will try to find this object, retrieve its icon, etc. The second option available in the "Fix" SmartPC section allows you to scan and fix all broken shortcuts on your disks.

Now, let's move to the "Clean" section of SmartPC. This section allows you to clear all the junk files accumulated on your disks. Sometimes applications "forget" to delete temporary files, and sometimes they leave temporary files due to software errors. SmartPC will empty directories of temporary files. It can also scan your disks to search for temporary files by extension. If you are anxious about security and identity theft, you may want to clean temporary Internet files, delete cookies, IE autofill data, etc.

In the "Optimize" section, you will also find several useful tools to boost your system performance and tune-up some hidden settings. "Hidden" means that these settings are not available through the Control Panel or standard Windows dialogs. For example, you can select whether you wish to log into your Windows account on boot without the need to enter your password, or whether you want Windows to show the login screen with a passwords prompt. The Startup and Un-install Entries Editors also provide some advanced features that are not available in standard Windows configuration applets.

The "Boost Windows" option provides a tool that constantly monitors your memory, removes unusable blocks and de-fragments usable blocks for faster access. If enabled, it runs invisibly and optimizes your system memory. In addition, this tool sets maximum processor use priority to the active window. When you watch a movie, you probably do not want it to make pauses when another application does something in background. Normally, all running applications share processor time equally. But if you want to boost a multimedia application to its maximum, you need it to give it an exclusive access to your processor.

Does your computer experience the "obesity" problem? Is it full of junk files, broken shortcuts and obsolete registry values? If so, it needs a treatment!

[e-mail]

Answer 10

its old