Revive That Old PC

The average life of a PC has often been touted at 3 to 5 years. This doesn’t mean you can’t get many more useful years out of one. As your operating system has grown, through all of those updates for security and other improvements, it has developed a voracious appetite for memory. New software is developed with the newer CPU’s and Memory in mind. It only stands to reason, if you have all of this updated software, the hardware needs to keep up. The simplest way to buy extra life for your PC is to increase the amount of memory installed on the motherboard. If your motherboard provides “shared” memory for the graphics requirements of your PC, installing a separate graphics card and turning off the share on the motherboard (a BIOS adjustment) can provide the extra performance to make your old PC feel like a new one. Couple that with the cleanup and defrag options in the previous article, and you may even get a few years out of an older “no longer supported” operating system.

What makes my computer so slow?

Over time, several things can (and do) slow down a computer.  As updates to your Operating System or other software are installed, there are greater demands on you computer’s memory and CPU. Items are added to your start-up menu, more icons are aded to your desktop, and the size of your registry grows to keep track of all that is going on. When software is removed (uninstalled), some references are often left behind, both in registry and on the hard drive. All this activity will eventually fragment both the hard drive and the registry for your operating system. Add to this the potential of virus, spam, and other malware bloating the amount of unnecessary information on your computer, and the resultant slowdowns are inevitable.

Sometimes your computer just seems slow and it may be that your network or internet connection is not responding properly.

Depending on the nature of your slowdown, improvements can be achieved by upgrading the memory or CPU, uninstalling software that is no longer used, deleting or backing up data to an external source, and clearing the cache, “deleted items” and wastebasket of your browser, email and operating system respectively. Further improvement can be gained by running a defragmentation utility on the hard drive and possibly a registry cleaning utility as well. Properly configured antivirus and antispam software should take care of most other computer-related slowdown.

For people that are comfortable dealing with all of this, it is not too complicated. We are here for those not as technically adept. Also, we are here for those few cases where further problems arise.

Computer Repair? Computer Upgrades? Computer Tutoring?

Grey Computer Repair provides quality computer repair, computer upgrades and computer tutoring for people in the Grey Bruce, Owen Sound, Meaford, Collingwood and Simcoe County areas. We’ll come to your home and repair your computer, upgrade it or even show you how to get the most out of your home computer.

With reasonable rates and friendly service , we will get you up and running in no time!