Can age alone slow a system down?
I've tried all the usual things to improve the speed of my friend's ~4 year old PC (disk clean up, chkdsk, defrag, registry clean etc) but it hasn't made much difference. Do the components become less efficient as they get old to slow the system? Thanks!
Comments
every thing slows with age. May be time to start replacing some hardware. one by one.
Age alone won't slow down a system, unless the hardware is failing. For eg, the power supply may degrade with age (takes a few years though), the hard drive may fail, etc. The other possibility is that there is excessive heat buildup in the system due to dust, non-working fans/heatsinks or incorrect airflow; this can cause throttling of the CPU to prevent thermal damage and decrease speed
Ofcourse, if you have a virus, or Windows has been corrupted, or there is heavy file fragmentation then the system will run slowly.
This is my usual routine for fixing slow computers, assuming there are no hardware problems.
(1) Run a FULL anti-virus scan with a good virus scanner. Get free editions of AVast or Antivir. Use the latest virus definitions file. But don't install or run more than one anti-virus at the same time.
(2) Run anti-spyware scans with Spybot S&D and malwarebytes.
(3) Ensure all Microsoft security updates are applied.
(4) Run disk cleanup to delete old temp files and other junk
(5a) Run chkdsk once to scan for file system errors. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265
(5b) Run a thorough disk defrag. Use a good defragmenter for this, and also run a boot-time defrag to fix the MFT and page file if they are fragmented. You can check out Diskeeper 2009, which is widely acknowledged to be the best defragger around. Their website has free 30-day trial versions. http://www.diskeeper.com/
(6) Disable unnecessary background processes and services that take up memory.
(7) Make sure all the hardware components have the latest and most stable drivers. Video card performance in particular is strongly dependent on drivers.
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