I can't remember the number of times people ask me why their computer is so slow. As technology advances, computers get faster and faster. Yet, for some reason, the computers that we use seem to slow down with time. To many people, this is something they just do not comprehend.

One common reason is that as people update the software on their computers to stay current, these software require more memory to run. As more features find their way into the software, it also means that the software will consume more memory. This can be solved by adding more memory to your computer. Adding more memory can be expensive, depending on what type of memory your computer uses, but many people will see a significant improvement in speed.

Another reason why a computer can be slow is that after you install and uninstall software and save your data to the computer, the files inside the computer become defragmented. This means that the files are spread out all over the hard disk and when the files are loaded, there is a longer load time as the computer has to load these files from all over the disk. This can be easily resolved by using Disk Defragmenter that comes with Windows. This is not so much of a problem nowadays in modern versions of Windows, as fragmentation of files are kept minimal.

The biggest issue though is due to the Windows registry. The registry is a database that is used by Windows and most software. It can be considered the heart of the operating system because it stores all sorts of information that is used constantly. However, because it is so frequently modified, after a while its performance begins to degrade and as a result, the entire computer slows down.

The best solution for this is to perform periodic maintenance on the Windows registry. Luckily nowadays this is very easy and convenient to do. In the past, I used to format my computers and reinstall everything once every 4 months. There's no need to do this anymore. Registry cleaner software can be used to optimize the Windows registry in an automated way, scanning through the huge registry to find errors and fix them. There's no need to be technically-inclined to do this, so it's really very easy. The only thing is that there are so many of such software around, so it's important to find a good one to maintain the system.