Why do computers become slow after a while, even after factory reset or hard disk formatting?
In: Technology
Many of the other posts are good and true. Computers slow down for many reasons.
Here my ELI5:
Does your bike rust after leaving it outside for years?
Do the tires sometimes pop?
Parts need service or care to keep working at top speed. Like a bike needs cleaning, so does a computer.
Computers are physical things, they have physical problems like old your old bike. Wear and tear happen. For computers, the major problem isn’t rust, but dust. Most computers are air-cooled. When dust clogs up the air-cooling the system slows down some of the parts to keep the heat from burning out parts. Heat can be a real problem for computers.
Computers also have high precision parts, that can wear out over time, such as hard drives. That means it makes it more tries to do the same thing reading or writing of data. This is like having a bearing out on your bike wheel, it will take more force to move the wheel. Hard drives also have motors inside them that spin a disk that is shaped like a set of solid bike wheels stacked on top of each other.
Overall, most people don’t take the time to clean the dust out of electronics. This causes them to fail. My bro-in-law just cleaned his PS4, and it ran so much better. It was packed with dust. Isn’t much you can do about failing hard drives other than replacing them with a newer hard drive or storage method that doesn’t use moving parts.
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