Why do computers become slow after a while, even after factory reset or hard disk formatting?
In: Technology
The computer doesn’t just become slow over time. I have a computer here at work with the original windows XP service pack one and it has never been connected to the internet. You’d swear it has an SSD in it because it boots up in mere seconds.
Computers become slow because of software updates becoming increasingly more bloated and demand faster components just to get the same performance you got with earlier versions.
It’s sort of a double edged sword though because if you don’t update your software, you’re less secure, but if you update, you’re more secure but your computer may be slower.
Great question OP!!
when you buy the computer, it is specced for the current generation of programs, but after using it for a while, you update the different programs. f.i new versions, or updates on office programs, a large anti-virus library, game patches, and updates usually also increase the load, as well as extra options for your video card, like a new DirectX version, new games, etc. but the hardware is still the same, while everything else gets more bloated. So technically your computer isn’t getting slower, but the stuff you put on it, is getting more bloated/heavy/fatty, etc.
Edit: to disagree with mysticalwizard92: a computer is a digital tool and technically it will correct a lot of garbage on the electronic side of things which could slow it down, but this is not what you will notice when a computer gets slower. the only thing you would notice in regard to physical degradation in the last few generations is your CPU throttling down due to too much dust in your CPU cooler cause of cats, or smoking. You could also run into errors on an SSD or hard disk, but that shows in different ways, and IMO is out of the scope of this question.
Registry and file cruft builds up. A little like when you move into a new apartment. Everything is clean and sparse. But after you’ve lived in it for a while, random stuff builds up on table and counterspace, that lifesize Boba Fett cardboard cutout in the corner looks cool but gets in the way everytime you try and get into the closet, speaking of which everytime you go to the closet to get your running shoes you have to move not one but two vacuum cleaners because you got a new Dyson for Christmas, but you haven’t got rid of the Hoover yet. Your breadmaker gets used all the time, but anytime you need to roll out some pastry for a pie you have to move it and the waffle iron and the toaster onto the kitchen table. Just to get the counter space. When you first moved in you hadn’t unpacked or got all this crap so you had oodles of counter space.
Similarly, as programs and files and user settings get downloaded, installed, they sit around and take up space. When you first unboxed your new computer right clicking on a file gives you a simple menu. Rename, delete, move, copy. NOW, you have 7 entries for 7zip, options to send files to your backup software, dropbox account, compare to an older version, cast to 3 separate devices, send it in an email. All of this stuff takes some time to look up. Right clicking a file used to be instantaneous and now it takes 2-3 seconds.
Reinstalling your OS or factory reset blows away all of the crap.
One major reason is your computer is doing different things. This is especially true if you are running modern software or using the WWW. For example, Wirth’s Law says that software is getting slower faster than hardware is getting faster, so your computing experience should be getting slower as time marches on. If your computer is from 2011, it probably runs software from 2011 well, as that software was written efficiently. Modern software in generally is written less efficiently as programmers use easier tools to write software in. On the WWW side, web pages are orders of magnitude more demanding for computer resources than they were even just a decade ago.
Part of it can be the hardware itself, though. One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that your CPU can just be running slower now (at a lower clock speed). The reason is that old computers fill up with dust or their fans stop working well. When your computer gets too hot, it automatically slows down the CPU (called “throttling”) to keep from overheating. If your computer is dusty or your fans have not been lubricated recently, it’s possible that your CPUs are essentially permanently throttled due to not being able to dissipate heat.
I’m editing in a summary…
## ELI5 summary
Your old computer can probably run nearly as fast as it ever could. Some hardware components can wear down or suffer from errors with time, but that’s likely not the issue. Go plug in your 1990’s video gaming consoles – they can still play games designed for them. Instead, the major issue is that you’re no longer using an old computer to run old programs. Modern programs and websites aren’t designed for your old hardware, so your computer will struggle to run them, leading to slower performance.
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## original post
A lot of answers are addressing software bloat issues, but OP assumes the computer has a slowdown after a factory reset. So, let’s roll with that assumption.
The main issue will be the modernization of the software you’ll choose to run off the reformatted machine. If you’re running 1990’s software on your 1990’s laptop, there shouldn’t be an issue. But chances are you’re not. Newer software is made with the intention of running on newer hardware. This applies to browsing the web as well. For example, modern sites load more background scripts nowadays.
The answer could involve hardware degradation, but probably not your CPU or RAM. CPU’s, for example, are built to last and don’t have much redundancy, so any transistor failure will likely result in a crash.
Your HDD or SSD storage, on the other hand, do degrade with use.
HDD’s can wear down ~~as the mechanical arm makes more and more passes over the disk~~ (edit: I used haphazard wording here. Your drive can develop bad sectors. The effect is typically minimal but in a very damaged case could be massive. See comments.)
SSD’s store data as charge in different cells, whose lining definitely wears with charge transfer. Read and write speeds will then take more time, as your computer accounts for errors from faulty cells. Still, this wear takes a while to accumulate.
You could swap your drive for a newer one to see if it helps… and it probably will, but mostly because of improved drive technology.
edit: There could also be a psychological perspective. You’ve undoubtedly used other machines. Your experience with, say, your brand new smart phone could clash with your experience on a machine whose hardware is no longer explicitly supported by developers.
The main culprit, though, is the additional load on your hardware that modern programs require. Old machines can’t cut it.
One reason can be that many people never clean out their cases and thermal throttling when components get too hot (because of obstructed airflow and dust-choked heatsinks) will slow the machine.
I assume you are asking mostly Windows
1. Hardware: if you have a classic HDD(not ssd) these have a portion of disk not exposed to the user where they can move sectors which are going have higher access time and since this will move the arm of the reader back and forth access time increases hence slower
(2).Windows: windows has a centralised place to hold all settings named registry which can get really big, garbled with orphaned shit which are not in use. It will be fragmented in time no matter what MS says that modern os does. Of course on ssd fragmentation is not an issue.
3. Software developers: qa doesn’t give mostly shit about how much resources a shitty piece of software takes since it is compliant to requirements. Nobody cares nowadays of optimization. They will just tell you that minjimum requirements are higher. Try to use open source software.
4. Internet applications: just fire up a wireshark session, open a single web page and look at how many “providers” you get. That’s all about round trip time to maaaany providers. Or call them sites.
5. Obviously all the “security” software that you install on Windows nowadays are a big burdain to any system. I’m watching sometimes windows defender take 48% of proc and some 23 mb/s of HDD(volume). For an… Undetermined amount of time.
That’s where you are nowadays. You can install a friendly distribution of Linux easier than windows nowadays on older laptops and they will perform. There are even Windows friendly dist of Linux like Mint that will work very fine for a Windows aficionado.
One friend of mine installed Mint for his 70+ parents and they are very happy.
One really big reason is simply dust. Computers have to throttle themselves to keep from getting too hot. If there’s a family of dust bunnies living in your case, that’s gonna impact cooling.
I’ve actually made some decent money by buying computers that were “slow” and using a screwdriver and can of duster to clean out all the filth; then they work fine. Same thing for game consoles. You’d be surprised how much dirt can accumulate in a PC case over time.
Web sites grow by the day, basically. The resources needed to render Facebook in 2020 is likely an order of magnitude greater than in 2010.
You also have things like video formats that offer better compression, but in return require more cpu power and/or memory.
Perhaps a really neat optimization trick in some software turned out to cause security holes, so the program was updated to be safer, but slower.
These are a small selection of things that cause computers to run slower even if they do exactly as many calculations now as they did a decade ago. There’s just so much more stuff that they need to do now that they can get overwhelmed.
Honestly a lot of it is perception. I have a feeling if you took a video of yourself doing something in windows 95 and then did that same task today (on the same system and all) it would be about the same amount if time.
However, when all the computers around us are faster and faster our perception of how long something should take changes.
There are comments about software bloat and all that, but I’m trying to relate this all to a fresh clean install on the same machine used previously.
Now there is degradation with time as well to components that also can slow things down. For example capacitors are a common point of failure in electronics and as those fail all sorts of things start happening including full shutdown and general slowing down.
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