Why do computers start to slow down over time?
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It depends on what part of your PC is slowing you down.
Most of what happens to a user’s PC is self-inflicted.
I’m going to assume you are using a Windows system for the following.
Your system startup or “cold-booting” your PC? Disable all the unnecessary programs in your systray that load when you turn your PC on. To disable them, turn on your Task Manager and look under “Start-up” and disable any programs you don’t need at the moment.
Are you running any unneeded services while you are gaming or browsing the web? Look under “Processes” and if you see any processes that aren’t needed by your OS to run and you are competent enough to know you can safely “end task” them with no issue, go ahead and terminate them.
Internet security has taken a sharp jump with Windows and there simply isn’t a high enough need for excess applications like there was 2 decades ago. Outside of Anti-Malware Malwarebytes as a Malware/Ransomware solution, the Windows Firewall and Windows Defender are more than capable of doing the job of protecting your system. I would like to add though that there are two complementing programs that will give you more granular control over those apps giving you an even higher level of protection. “Malwarebytes Windows Firewall Control” and “Configure Defender” will allow you to fully defend your Windows 10 or 11 OS.
Do you regularly clean your PC out as thoroughly as possible? Buildup of dust which precipitates heat into your system can wear your system peripherals down causing premature wear and tear on your PC. Get a strong blower and clean out your system every few months if that’s the least you can do.
Lastly, is your PC really slowing down or is it your perception of it? If you have a smartphone with a timer app or a wristwatch of any sort, actually time how long it takes for your system to boot up, browse the web, how long it takes for an application to load, play different games, etc. You want tangible results and data you can work with in this case, not feelings or hunches. You might want to benchmark your equipment to see what numbers you are pulling, so you have a real world example.
Most of the above came from my own trial and error over the years as I wanted to simplify my system for my own use. Experience may vary.
Poor maintenance usually, it’s almost always software related. This PC is 10 years old, ouch, and runs just fine, it’s running Windows 10 and it boots and operates swiftly, the only upgrade it’s had is an SSD to replace the HDD. If it wasn’t for the fact i’ve played all the games I want to and I can’t play some newer games i’d quite happily keep this one running.
I’d like to add that not just installed programs and the operating systems get more bloated over years, but also things like website are way more complex than a few years ago. Bigger images, more animations and more scripts that do things in the background.
So if you open a few websites they consume a lot of memory. My notebook has 8 GB of ram which was more than enough a few years ago. Nowadays my machine would sometime get sloggish if I have too many tabs and applications open at the same time.
Oh and BTW, in the days of mechanical hard drives there was the problem of fragmentation. Files get constantly copy and deleted which leads to parts of files being cluttered over the hard drive. Reading these cluttered files would take much longer with mechanical drives. So you’d either had to defragment your drive after a while or deploy file systems which mitigated the effect somewhat.
Ok, here is the real reason PC slow down over time. One as someone mentioned is software bloat. Not only does this take up space on your hd it adds to overhead of windows services running by taking up memory ,in the background to support each app. This but the windows registry contains all the settings and information about each application. So windows has to read the registry to find what it needs. Each added software package increases the size of the registry.
You only have limited resources
CPU -. Processing power – application & services
Memory – get as much as you can and make sure it’s fast clock speed
And
Disk space -. Windows needs swap space so having a drive that is even 80 or 90% full is still going to slow you down.
This is why people wipe their machine every 3 year and it will run better for a while.
In the long run newer applications require better PC components.
If you bought apple stuff, that happens. I found that out 8 years ago and haven’t bought any apple stuff since. IPad1 can barely load cnn.com. takes forever!
My 10 years old windows 8 is still chugging along fine. It’s as fast as the day I bought it. No issues loading any sites.
My best guest is planned obsolescence. Apple wouldn’t be a trillion dollar company unless people keep buying its stuff, annually.
It’s not that computers get slower, it’s that newer computers get faster, and technology gets more demanding, making older computers seem slower at doing those newer tasks.
That’s the best explanation I can give a five-year-old.
Computers don’t necessarily get slower. so much as the things we ask them to do get harder.
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.
The circuits are made of atoms which have protons and electrons. Well electricity runs though these circuits. Sometimes an electron entering one side bumps off two electrons from the exit side, net loss 1. Well as you can imagine, over time you run out of electrons if this keeps happening, and electronics without the electron is just ick.
Another cause that I haven’t seen anyone mention is fragmentation. Hard drives (drives with a spinning platter as opposed to SSDs) can fetch data much faster if it’s contiguous rather than scattered all around the disk. Starting with an empty drive files will be written out nicely, but the longer you use the drive, the more files will end up scattered across the disk in non-contiguous chunks. This means the average speed at which you can read files from your drive will decrease over time.
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