The first indication that most people have about a problem
with their system is that the Graphical User Interface (GUI) slows
to a crawl. Applications no longer start as fast as they once did
and when they do, they don’t process information very quickly. Every
keystroke becomes a laborious act of a dying machine. Frustration
builds and the user quickly blames aging machinery as the source of
the problem.
Computers don’t have joints that age as you and I do.
They don’t suddenly become slower as they age because there’s nothing
that aging can do to slow the computer’s processing speed. I’ve seen
more than a few people get perfectly acceptable performance from a
machine that’s five or six years old (well beyond the time needed
to write the machine off as a tax deduction). Other factors contribute
to the perception that the computer is getting slower. You can divide
the problems with a slowing machine into the following categories:
1 Too many running applications
2 Newer applications that require more resources
3 An accumulation of old data
4 User experience increases