Why do computers start to slow down over time?
In: 1180
Technically nothing.
I have a like 15 year old computer I still use. Slapped a used cheapo GPU in it and I’m still playing modern games. Granted fighters aren’t that demanding
It’s entirely possible it’s done to make you buy new ones. Technical talk aside – your phone 10 years ago had more capabilities than Apollo 11 but could barely check an email now right?
The components age, and the programs you want to run get more demanding. There are other factors but these two probably explain 80% of it. Try getting new hardware, or cleaning out an old computer, and it will suddenly seem as if it works faster for no reason.
Three main reasons:
1. Software that becomes more demanding / not as well optimized for low-spec machines.
2. Bloatware that clogs your drives, system services and autostart. A competent user can actually handle these effects pretty well, and restore even older machines back into surprisingly good condition.
3. Decay of the hardware, e.g. drives going bad. Running at lower temperatures can increase the longevity of most hardware significantly.
Whether launching a program or reading a file, the computer must get that data from the HDD or SDD, and that data comes in (typically) 512-byte chunks, the size of an HDD sector. The OS keeps track of all the sectors for every file. Over time – as you create new files and delete old files – the disk becomes fragmented, meaning that the sectors for a given program or file can be scattered all over the disk. Because the HDD takes time to move the read head into position to read the next sector, as the disk becomes more fragmented, the load times get longer.
There are utilities that can “defrag” an HDD and doing so can dramatically improve the response time of your computer because it moves all sectors for a file together so they can be read faster. The OS will boot much faster since that is a huge chunk of data.
Source: been doing computers for over 50 years since before PCs.
A thing I haven’t seen being mentioned, is the fact that silicone, the material chips are off of, degrades over time. Typically it will be about a decade before your processor or graphics card shows signs of it, but it can depend. Mainly on how heated the system gets. For example someone who overclocks their PC, may notice it faster than someone who uses it at factory clocks.
I worked in desktop support for idk close to 15 years. Yes, computers age and programs get bigger and more resource intensive, but here are the biggest issues I saw causing serious slowdowns:
1) No free space on the hard drive. So many people would have a few hundred MB left on their hard drive! Like they thought they could fill it to the brim, with no space for swap files, new files, whatever.
2) Malware.
3) Random non-malware shit that runs in the background. Folks totally forget they had installed some distributed Folding at Home or similar thing, and it just sits or hides down there always running.
4) Actual non-catastrophic hardware failure. It was staggering the number of folks who had major slowing in their 2012(?) era MacBook Pro and had the Genius Bar tell them in 2015 their computer was just “too old,” but it worked just fine when I replaced the pinched HDD ribbon cable.
5) Poorly tested and updated OEM tools. I rescued so many HPs and Lenovo’s from the scrapyard by finding that some Smart Keyboard process or HP service center process was pegging the CPU.
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.
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.
Computers don’t necessarily get slower. so much as the things we ask them to do get harder.
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