Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies.

Listener Kathy M. posted a great question on the Tech Talker Facebook wall . She wanted to know how to optimize her computer, making it run faster without adding any extra hardware. This is a great question because it’s something we’ve all encountered. We buy a computer and it’s lightning-fast. Then, after a few years, we notice that our formerly speedy machine takes forever to do everything. One of the reasons for this is us. During the life of a computer, we tend to install lots of software and other files that slow down its functioning.

Why Computers Slow Down
However, although computers do slow down after the installation of software, the main reason they get slower is because every year newer software has bigger and bigger requirements. For example: The Windows 98 operating system required 24 megabytes of memory and just 200 megabytes of hard drive space, whereas Windows 7 requires 2 gigabytes of memory and 20 gigabytes of hard drive space. As we learned in How to Back Up Your Data, a gigabyte is about a thousand megabytes so in a 10-year span the requirements for computers have increased 100 times. Who wouldn’t slow down!

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6 Comments

1. 1. RDH 11:13 AM 8/22/12

   I worked with a guy that once said "Software is getting slower faster than hardware is getting faster."
   
   I thought that summed up the issue quite nicely. Programs will always push the boundaries of hardware capabilities.
   
   How do we define "fast enough"?
   
   If I have to wait, it's not fast enough.
   
   And counter intuitively, the hardware itself also got slower. As Intel, AMD etc. started adding multiple cores, they had to turn the clock rates down. This meant a user could buy a new computer, and find that the same software actually ran slower on the new machine than the user's old machine. And along with the slower clock, the Windows OS will also do context switching between cores, adding more overhead to task switching. We got a lot of support calls where customers complained about this.
   
   And that brings me to a favorite "trick" to get a particular process to run faster on these early gen multi-core machines. Go to the task manager and right click on a process and pick the "processor affinity" command from the context menu. Lock that process to a single core. That avoided the context switching overhead and the process could actually run a bit faster. This of course depends on the process. But if you have a compute intensive process, that process is a great candidate for affinity manipulation.
   
   The latest generation of Intel processors have finally got clock rates back up over 3 ghz. But even the i7 doesn't hit the 3.6 - 3.8 ghz that the last single core processors achieved.

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2. 2. sapbucket 11:16 AM 8/22/12

   I don't see any useful information in this article. The author writes,"However, although computers do slow down after the installation of software, the main reason they get slower is because every year newer software has bigger and bigger requirements. For example: The Windows 98 operating system required 24 megabytes of memory and just 200 megabytes of hard drive space, whereas Windows 7 requires 2 gigabytes of memory and 20 gigabytes of hard drive space. As we learned in How to Back Up Your Data, a gigabyte is about a thousand megabytes so in a 10-year span the requirements for computers have increased 100 times. Who wouldn’t slow down!"
   
   Why is the author confusing size (the amount of RAM and HDD space) with speed (which should be bus speed, cpu speed, etc.)?

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3. 3. WRQ9 12:14 PM 8/22/12

   The most effective software I've seen on the web lately is designed to slow down your computer. Seems to me the only way to speed it back up is not to revisit those sites. It was part of a campaign to "clean your mac".
   I would like to have a function on my computer to slap every site that tried that nonsense right in the face so they would know I knew what they were up to, and didn't like it. If you get a slap for being a jerk, it's not as fun any more.

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4. 4. singing flea 02:18 PM 8/22/12

   Several things that were not mentioned were catch optimization, program priority and browser control. As RDH pointed out, changing processor affinity can improve performance on certain programs, but only those not specifically written for multiple processor systems. Adjusting the priority can help when background process are hogging resources even with programs written for multiprocessors.
   
   Cache optimization helps with large file processing like Photoshop or video/3D rendering applications.
   
   My biggest slow down grip was always download speed when on the Internet. I assumed it was just traffic on my local ISP. I have for a long time been a big fan of Mozilla Firefox. The slower that browser got, the more I began to take notice of the preloading notification bar on the bottom. The big commercial sites were often literally loading dozens of ad related inquires for the purpose of targeting me based on my past history and the cookies I neglected to dump. The solution was amazingly simple. I installed Ad Blocker Plus. Essentially what the plug in does is shut down java scripts that are not part of the actual page content. If I want to use interactive sites that need java running, I just switch to Google Chrome which is highly optimized for junk ads and java.
   
   Now when I go to view video clips on news sites with Firefox, it skips all the annoying ads that repeat over and over and the clips I do want load much faster. It was amazing what it did for horrible loading speed on the Drudge report which makes it's money primarily by selling your browser history to any company that will pay them a fraction of a penny for it all (which must number in the hundreds on Drudge) and makes you wait for all that garbage programming to load first before giving you all the cherry picked news links Matt cockroached from the political blogs and legitimate news sites.
   
   

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5. 5. dadster 03:53 PM 8/22/12

   this article is about selling you antivirus software which requires yearly payments for renewing them.dont have any other illusions of usefulness except to the antivirus software marketeers .

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6. 6. usafang67 in reply to sapbucket 04:01 PM 8/22/12

   "Why is the author confusing size (the amount of RAM and HDD space) with speed (which should be bus speed, cpu speed, etc.)?"
   
   That's because the author is lucky to know how spell "PC" ........... he's winging it :-)

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