When a computer starts running extremely slow and a simple restart fixes it, what is really happening?
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Most of the time, the slow-running computer is laboring under a lot of background programs that the user hasn’t shut down.
Restarting closes those programs so the rebooted system runs quicker since it’s doing less.
If the computer has a lot of start-up programs, though, it’ll start slowing down again.
My best analogy is your computer is like your kitchen. In an ideal world, you do one task in the kitchen, clean up and the kitchen is returned to its ideal state: clean, organized, ready to do anything.
But as you cook, dirty dishes pile up in the sink. To wash the veg, you have to move the dirty dishes. Can’t put them in the oven, the lasagne is cooking, I know stack em on the sideboard. Crap, where do I put the lasagne to cool out of the oven, the sideboard is stacked with dirty dishes. Etc. As you do work, if you’re lucky, you clean up partially, but things become more disorganized and cluttered until all of the working space of your kitchen (if not elsewhere in your house) is occupied by stuff that needs to be cleaned, or stuff that is work in progress for something else, and the entire thing grinds to a halt and your order in Chinese food. In our cluttered kitchen, to do anything, even something simple, you have to do seven other things first. [Like Hal changing a lightbulb.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0). Things get real slow.
In your computer, resources are finite, whether its open handles to access files on storage drives, memory, or process/threads in the CPU. Usually, if a program finishes, it cleans up after itself. But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you launch one program and it actually spins off a bunch of copies of smaller helper programs or sub-programs to do stuff, and sometimes these never get cleaned up. Sometimes programs write large files of interim data and never get deleted. Sometimes a program gets stuck waiting on something to happen that never does (like you’re waiting on the 10 yr old to take out the garbage but they never do) and so its frozen. Eventually your computer gets clogged just like in our kitchen analogy.
Rebooting a computing device.. any operating system really.. is like cleaning your kitchen: everything returns to a good, known, base clean and organized state.
Applications are allowed to consume memory and use resources as much as the computer is equipped with.
Unfortunately that makes developers sloppy when it comes to memory management.
They forget to clean up after closing those apps or do a poor job doing so.
Operating systems are also not very smart to free resources or control apps memory’s consumption.
The longer you keep the computer running the more chances of memory not freed properly leading eventually to consume it all leaving the operating system struggling to find any for new apps.
The only solution left is to restart the computer resulting a force reset of the memory.
Now read above again but for CPU.
Some apps still run in the background even though you closed them and restarting the computer might skip them (unless it is part of the boot process)
the ram or memory on your computers is like a worktable. you can only put so many things on it at a time to work on.
when you pull out one project (software) and them put it up it, not all the tools make it back. a screw, piece of tape might be left on the work table. eventually these things clutter up the space so much that you have to work around them and move them etc.
rebooting the computer takes everything off this worktable and cleans it back to its fresh starting position.
turn off the things that auto start on boot to further keep your worktable clutter free.
I don’t know exactly what causes it; since there are a myriad of possibilities, but what you can do in lieu of doing a full restart is looking for the explorer.exe in your task manager and right clicking on that and clicking restart.
This will sometimes accomplish the same thing, usually fixes issues with UI components, like if you notice slow animation clicking the start button or opening folders or alternating windows.
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I am sorry but to answer your question, should I maybe use what amounts to a Harry Potter book, there can be so many reasons, and I properly don’t know half of them. It can be everything from software, operating system, viral, old junk from former programs, hardware, heat, settings and so on. In other word, it can be literally thousands of things that can make it like that.
Pro tip: crack open scheduled tasks and disable everything that makes sense (related to applications, not the o/s). A lot of companies will create start up tasks that eventually become resource hogs.
Then disable stuff in your task manager startup tab.
Another tip. Turn off the computer, disconnect from power ( battery removal if laptop,). Hold down the power button for 5 seconds, repeat.
Power up and pray. This sometimes clears up stubborn problems not cured by simply restarting.
Can also be hardware related. My Dell laptop slows down when the bios thinks it has an unrecognised battery. Very annoying.
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