Why do Windows based PCs and Laptops appear to ‘degrade’ over time, appearing to run slower than when first purchased even after fresh Windows installations?

Question

Lots of variables I accept 《edited to remove personal view》

After say, five years, their performance is noticeably slower than it was when they were new, and the question is not in reference to increased graphical demands from games. The question is referring to day to day operations, web browsing and so on. Moving parts are limited, could they be the cause?

Thanks in advance

In: Technology

Answer 1

These days it doesn’t. There is a degree of newer software being written for newer and faster processors, but these days the range of processing power varies a ton and simply browsing the web should not be slow. I’ve had my currently laptop for 2 years, my wife has had hers for about 5, neither are any slower than when we bought them. If your computer is getting slower as time goes on you need to ensure defender is turned on and that you aren’t running dodgy programs or accidentally installed adware. Might be worth checking task manager to see what’s chewing up CPU cycles if that’s the issue.

Hard drives can degrade but if you have an SSD it’s unlikely the case, and I would be surprised if a 5 year old computer is running spinners aside from mass secondary storage.

The answers about things like circuits getting hot and degrading is wrong. I burn the hell out of my laptops, especially my work laptop (like I would be shocked if I didn’t peak 90C daily) because it’s unavoidable and a macbook is just what they offer. If heat is damaging components you will start to see things like sporadic crashes, or it simply won’t turn on. It would take some really odd circumstances for heat damage to cause slowdowns. Computers typically will throttle the CPU when it gets hot to prevent damage, but that would be true from day 1. If anyone wants proof of this my 2011 sandy bridge CPU was only recently retired and replaced, has chugged along the same for almost a decade, and it’s gotten some heavy stress put on it from gaming to running as a pretty active hypervisor.

Slowdowns these days are almost exclusively related to the software, usually poorly written or malicious software.