Ask the Techno-File
By Jon Kenton
Q. I have a PC that has served me well for the past three years. but recently it has started to run slower and slower. I use it primarily for general office-type applications, letters, e-mails, etc. I also store music and connect to my MP3 player. I recently bought a new digital camera and download my photos on to the PC. Why is it now going so slowly? Is it broken?
A. Your PC is probably not physically broken, as a hardware problem is usually pretty black and white—it either works 100 percent, or it doesn’t. Performance problems are more likely to be software-related. There are two main reasons for a slow PC. First, you may now be overtaxing it and running out of resources. Second, you may have become infected with a virus, Trojan, or other malware.
First, you need to assess whether it runs slowly all the time or only when you are using certain applications. If you have installed and begun using new applications such as photo-editing software (you mentioned a new camera) and it’s when you run these that everything slows down, you are probably low on system resources—most likely memory. A three-year-old system might be a low configuration, with only 256MB of memory. This would be OK for word processing and e-mail, but even a simple photo-editing program would begin to exhibit speed issues with this limited amount of memory. These days, 512MB should be the bare minimum, and I would recommend 1GB or more if you want to do advanced photo work. Check your system properties, and if it shows less than 512MB, consider a memory upgrade.
If your system runs slowly all the time, even directly after it’s turned on, then you may have picked up a virus. No PC should run without virus protection, so if you don’t have any, run out to your local big-box PC store and buy any of the popular products like Norton or MacAfee. Install the software, run a full-system scan, and let it deal with anything it finds.
If things don’t improve, you may need to use tools to check for Trojans or malware. There are a few freeware products available that do a good job. Check out Spybot Search and Destroy (www.safer-networking.org) and Ad-Aware SE Personal from Lavasoft (www.lavasoftusa.com). Download, install, and run one or both of these, and fix whatever they find. I’d say that 98 percent of the problems I see can be fixed by this stage. If you still have problems, then it’s time to call in a professional.
Q. I use Windows XP and have been hearing about Windows Vista. Should I upgrade to this new version?
A. Vista is much more than just a new version of XP. It has a radically different look and feel, and changes many things XP users will be familiar with. In my humble opinion, I would not upgrade a perfectly good working system just for the sake of having Microsoft’s newest offering. The track record of initial releases of Windows products has not been stellar; XP needed to get to SP2 to fix many issues. Unless you have a burning desire to be an early adopter, I would wait until Vista SP1 appears, and only then if there are features that Vista has that you cannot live without.
Vista does have many new features; unfortunately, there is not enough room in this issue to cover them all (look out for a future article). The most obvious one, however, is the desktop, which has had a total revamp with new gadget tools and transparent windows. Security is vastly improved, and if this is a big concern to you, is probably one of the only reasons for considering an upgrade now. If you buy nearly any new PC, it will have Vista installed, but the bottom line for existing systems is hold off for awhile—at least until SP1.