Hi, i'm not sure why but my computer has slowed down in almost every function.

i haven't intentionally installed or downloaded anything new.

website, programmes, menu bars all seem to take an extra few seconds to load

where do you think would be a good place to look to see if need to delete anything?

thanks

James

The first thing to do is to run Task Manager. You can launch this by right-clicking on the Windows taskbar at the bottom of the screen. There is a Performance tab in Task Manager which shows your processor (CPU) usage as well as your memory usage in relation to how much RAM you actually have installed in the PC. Leave Task Manager running and monitor what happens to the processor usage and RAM usage when you try to open applications, browse web sites, etc. Any unusually high usage in these two areas will need investigating to find the cause.

Task Manager also has a Processes tab which details all of the components of applications that are currently running, along with the amount of time that they are using the CPU and how much memory they are allocated. Sorting these columns into descending order will show the biggest resource hogs at the top.

If you need any more detailed assistance with this, let us know

thanks

when starting either MS Word or Excel the CPU usage very briefly darts to 100% than comes back down again. And the physical memory goes from 130000 available to 110000.

also these are the processes, i have no idea whether this is normal or not.

Originally Posted by jiminwatford

when starting either MS Word or Excel the CPU usage very briefly darts to 100% than comes back down again.

That's quite normal.

Your list of processes doesn't show anything particularly out of the ordinary, although I see that your three Internet Explorer sessions were hogging lots of memory so I'm assuming that you're running Internet Explorer 7. Is that correct?

Your PC seems to be using a lot of memory overall for just running Excel and three IE sessions. Do you know how much RAM you have in the PC? If you aren't sure, go back to the Performance tab of Task Manager and read off the 'Total' figure in the Physical Memory section.

It's got 512 mb, thanks,

The simple answer then is that your PC has run out of RAM. You have 512MB but you can see from your screenshot (bottom right corner) that Windows is trying to use 698MB. Once it runs out of RAM, or physical memory, it will use virtual memory - a temporary bit of space on your hard disk that it uses as a memory substitute. Virtual memory is MUCH slower than RAM and, if your PC is using it quite a lot, then you'll definitely notice a slow-down in performance.

The simplest solution is to fit more RAM.

However, it does seem that your PC's Windows environment is rather inefficient and could do with some clearing out. By comparison, my Windows XP SP2 system uses 400MB RAM when I have Outlook and 3 Internet Explorer sessions open so there's roughly 298MB of extra 'clutter' running on your PC !

The first place to check is in the Start Menu. Go to All Programs and check the Startup folder. If you have Adobe Reader Speed Launch (or some other Adobe Acrobat Reader startup program), delete it. If you have Quicktime Task Tray, delete it. If you have Office Startup, delete it. What else do you have listed in there?