Solid state hard drives take advantage of flash memory, which is found primarily in tablets and smartphones.
It's just the nature of their design.Ī simple solution to prevent slowdowns caused by the hard drive is to install a solid state hard drive (SSD) in your current computer or buy a new computer with one. It's important to note that all spinning hard drives will die eventually, it could be tomorrow but it could also happen 10 years from now. (Flickr / markusram) If you have a spinning hard drive, once they get older they simply start to slow down as they reach the end of life. There are useful free programs that help you easily identify what is taking up space on your hard drive:įor Mac users try: OmniDiskSweeper, a free program that breaks down exactly which files take up the most space.įor PC users try WinDirStat, a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool. This will fill up your hard drive, causing you to run out of space at the price of speed. The computer will constantly seek more RAM taking away resources from other tasks.Īnother thing users fall victim to is installing unnecessary software. Not having enough RAM causes your hard drive to try to compensate for a lack of memory. Two other huge culprits are not having enough RAM (memory to run programs) and simply running out of hard disk space.
Rachel told us that software and hard drive corruption are two reasons why your computer may slow down over time.Ĭorruption can be caused by a host of things but it's mostly bugs in the operating system, corrupted RAM data, static electricity (from carpet or other fabrics), power surges, failing hardware, and for Windows users, normal operating system decomposition with age. We started by speaking with Rachel, a tech expert who works at New York City authorized Apple repair shop Tekserve.
In addition, there are many other things that contribute to a slowdown. Regardless of whether you have a PC or Mac, over time as you download files, install software, and surf the Internet, your computer gets bloated with files that hog system resources.
That's because it doesn't have anything on it. The thing is, when you first get a new computer and boot it up it works lightning fast.