Why do computers start to slow down over time?
In: 1180
Multiple reasons.
The first main reason is the software that runs on the phone gets updated and uses more and more resources with each update. So a software may have only started off using 2GB of memory, but after 2 years of updates it now uses 4GB of memory because they added new features. So you’re phone hasn’t gotten slower, but it now has much more it has to process, creating the illusion that is has slowed down. This happens because developers develop based on the currently available hardware, not what was available years ago.
Building on this it is made worse the more things you install on a computer that run in the background that you forget about. You may have software on your computer that automatically launches at startup and runs in the background, but you haven’t actually used it in years. Cleaning up old software you don’t use anymore will go a long ways towards restoring some speed.
Building on this more, your computer may be fine, but you may have a bottleneck elsewhere, such as on your router. So you think your computer is slow, but in reality your network setup can’t handle the bandwidth demand of 4 people trying to stream at once.
Second: Dust buildup impacts cooling capabilities, which impacts speed. Electronics work at their best when they are cool. Over time dust builds up, hindering a computer’s ability to cool. As heat builds up it can cause the electronics to run less efficient and slower. Many computers now have temperature monitoring of some sort and will throttle performance/resources in an attempt to prevent permanent damage to the system.
Third: Part degradation. Even though they don’t have moving parts, as electrons move through the computer and the parts generate heat, they do break down at the molecular level. After years, this can impede their performance by a little, but the bigger problem is they may stop performing withing a certain expected tolerance, and start causing noise or dropped data. Your computer now has to work harder to handle errors due to aging hardware.
Fourth: This doesn’t apply as much anymore, but older computers that use a disk drive with spinning discs can become a mess of organization. A single file may be spread out over 30 different locations and the read head would have to jump around to find each one. You can de-fragment these which causes the computer to move all those locations to be right next to each other so the read head can grab them all one after the other without jumping around.
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