What is the number one technological hurdle of computing? What problem plagues people more than anything else, despite massive leaps in hardware and software in the past twenty years?
“My computer is just so sloooooow.”
Ironic, really. Think about it – the one thing that vendors incessantly bombard us with is how fast their new product is. That alone is a clue, I suppose, that something is amiss – if someone is constantly yelling at you that the reason it’s better is because it’s faster, obviously being slow was a problem in the first place. And the more people are yelling about it, the bigger a problem it probably is.
The catch, though, the great reveal to this particular magic trick, is that the reason our computers never seem any faster is because they aren’t actually slow in the first place.
Nope, I’m not about to pull some zen mystical “it is what you want it to be,” although if you can pull that off, more power to you – go do that and stop reading this. For those of us who can’t do that (raises hand) we’ll be better suited by applying a staple of troubleshooting: if a problem hasn’t been solved by trying the same thing 500 times, perhaps we should try something else.
In this case, the solution has been to get more powerful hardware. Generally, people do this when the old computer (which felt fast when they got it) just keeps getting slower and slower and finally is so slow that it can’t really accomplish any of the tasks they want. They go buy a new computer (It’s fifty gigawatts faster! It has five teraflops! Its cores are squared by Pi and then fibrillated with dark matter! And so on…) and it seems a little faster, it gets things done, and then the cycle starts all over again.
The cycle in this case is: You bought a horse and attached it to a carriage. Then, as you got more stuff, you used a tractor-trailer instead. And then you filled it with lead bricks.
What my analogy-happy self is trying to say is that computers ship (for the most part) able to easily do all the tasks that most average users would need to do. Quickly, with no problems. But over time, hobbled by new software and new demands, your computer increasingly finds itself at a disadvantage. This problem is compounded by a lot of manufacturers that ship their computers completely filled with garbage – in other words, they sell you the horse already attached to the tractor trailer. It’s a happy case that Apple doesn’t do this, which is why most people get their Mac and are blown away at how quick it seems. It’s true that Macs are fast, good computers, but it’s something of an unfair advantage vs Windows – Microsoft can’t begin to account for all the garbage-ware that manufacturers then slap onto whatever system they are shipping. A completely clean install of Windows 7 will run fast and snappy, but the chances of you coming across a clean install of Windows in the wild is next to nil.
What I’m driving at here is that if your Mac is slow, there’s probably a reason, because it shouldn’t be. There are a thousand caveats that apply to that of course – primarily you use it as a ‘normal’ user – browsing the web, importing and managing an average amount of photos from your digital camera, managing a few gigabytes of music, creating word processing documents, presentations, and so on. The minute you get into heavy video or audio editing, or processing large amounts of media in general, all those theories go out the window.
But assuming you fall into ‘average user’ category – and most of us do – there are a few basic reasons why your computer might be slow.
1) It’s slow when it’s brand new.
Either you have unusual demands, extreme expectations, or there is something actually wrong with it that needs to be repaired, whether it is hardware or software. There’s no reason for it to be slow.
2) It slows down after you’ve had it for a while, or after you’ve used it for a while.
This is where the meat comes in. Almost always, the problems here fall into a few basic categories, and none of them have anything to do with the ‘speed’ of your computer. To explain that a bit further, your computer accomplishes things in roughly this order:
Retrieve data from the file cabinet (hard drive) > Put it on your desk (RAM) > Accomplish tasks (CPU)
That’s grossly simplified, of course – the CPU comes into play during all of those stages, not just when you are accomplishing tasks, and actually, that’s the reason so much attention used to be paid to the CPU. Is it Intel? How many gigahertz? How many cores? Etc, etc. As the processing brain of your computer, the processor is traditionally seen as the choking point where your computer slows down as it tries to compute whatever task you’ve given to it.
These days, however, I would make the argument that how fast your processor is is actually the last thing you need to be worried about. It comes into play in power user circumstances, and that’s about it. The big bottlenecks that give you the spinning beach-ball of death are:
The size of your desk (the amount of memory, or RAM your computer has), and how fast you can pull things out of the filing cabinet (how fast is your storage, IE, your hard drive).
This is fairly self explanatory. If you have a tiny desk and you are shuffling around through all your materials to work on things, your productivity plummets. If you have to go across the room, yank open a metal drawer, and then sort through a giant pile of papers, you spend more time getting data and putting it away than anything else. Your computer is no different.
What this means is that RAM and hard drive speed are where your speed increases will come from – likewise, it’s when those resources are taxed that your computer will significantly slow down. This is where “slows down after use” or “slows down after a while” comes in. The higher the number of applications you are running, and the more documents you have open, the more RAM you use up. If you use up all available RAM the computer will start swapping stuff onto and off of the hard drive, which is the same as you constantly dashing to the file cabinet and putting things away to keep some amount of space on your desk open.
The killer here is that computers are finally shipping with a reasonable amount of RAM, and because of this, companies are shipping programs with the assumption that you have all sorts of resources available, and their applications basically gobble everything up. The amount of RAM an average applications demands is astronomical, and if you don’t have enough, and if you run even a few newer, extra, programs over what your computer shipped with you might start looking at a situation where it’s gotten noticeably slower.
Which leads us to our final point: what’s running on your computer? Nothing eats up memory like having a bunch of programs hovering in the background by default. Is Skype auto-launching? Are you always running Sirius radio? What about anti virus, or heaven forbid, some atrocity like Mac Keeper that’s supposed to ‘speed things up’ (Note: it doesn’t. ‘Maintenance’ utilities that run in the background aren’t a tractor trailer for your horse, it’s a bullet to the head).
In short, the trifecta for troubleshooting speed issues is:
1) Are your uses beyond the average user? If yes, you probably need more RAM.
2) If no, there is a problem that needs some troubleshooting. Something is wrong.
3) Did your computer go from being fast in the past to slow now? Either your demands on it have grown via new software, or there is a bunch of crud running that should not be running. Or both. Get more RAM, get less crud.
As may have noticed, this is all pretty RAM happy. RAM, RAM, RAM, all the time. And it’s true – the first thing I do after checking to make sure everything is okay on a system, if people want more speed, is suggest installing more RAM. But every once in a while, I get people who already have plenty who still feel their computer is slow, and are considering buying a new one. In those cases, I’d urge you to think of a different alternative – there’s a way to dramatically increase the speed of your current computer, and very frequently, make it faster than anything you would buy brand new. But we’ll get to that next week.