Why is my computer running so slowly?

save your work to a separate disk, reformat the drive and start with a fresh install of windows. I reinstall every 3 months. It helps maintain a computers life longer.

Could be due to a number of thing – or even combination of things, such as:
Low processor speed
Insufficient RAM
Cluttered harddrive
Little available space on your harddrive
‘Ghost’ or background processes

Start simple in your troubleshooting; restart, clean up your files and folders, defragment your drive, but if none of these help, a fresh install may be the way to go

@jamms Reinstalling your OS every 3 Months wouldn’t help your PC…. It would actually hurt it more then help. Yes, everything is new, your cache is clean, no temp files. But think about how much you stress your HDD and you Optical Drive every time you do this. Every 3 Months this means you, Copy some data from your HDD To your Backup, then formate the drive, then copy files to it, then decompress files, copy more files, install programs, and anything else…Then repeat the process again in 3 Months. It’s just to much stress on the HDD.

But your point on saving your data or work to a separate disk is a great idea. Also it wont require you to have a big HDD for your OS, and it would even speed up read and write times due to the small size. Sata HDD’s would also improve the speed and reliability of everything.

Sounds like you have a virus-laden PC, and I’ve often heard it suggested that people re-install the OS every 3 months to work-around the fact they are so prone to viruses. My advice is simple. Get a Mac. I no longer even think about viruses, let alone spend any of my life trying to remedy them, and its a better computing environment anyway (IMO). For point of comparison, I have left my Mac continuously on and connected to the Internet without any virus protection for more than 3 months without even restarting it once during that time (no crashes, hangs, viruses, etc)! Not to mention that you can also run Windows on them at full speed now if you really want to.

@Maverick: The last time I owned a PC I ran Linux on it for those reasons. Unfortunately this is a work computer.

I should add that the reinstall method is because my work requires me to test a lot of security software and the best solution for me is to reinstall. This does not apply to everyone, although with many windows users could greatly benefit from a reformat every now and again.

I recently saw an article on digg stating that if you want to improve your computers speed add a new graphics card rather than a new processor. becasue the number of cores in a processer, 2 or 4, can be challanged by the number of cores in a good graphics card over 100
article