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10 common troubleshooting areas you should examine before you consider drastic steps such as reformatting and reimaging or buying new computers.
1. Processor overheating
The processor fan may fail for several reasons:
- Dust is preventing the fan from spinning smoothly.
- The fan motor has failed.
- The fan bearings are loose and jiggling.
Often, you can tell if there is a fan problem by listening and/or touching the computer. A fan that has loose bearings starts jiggling and vibrates the case, making a characteristic noise. As time goes by, the sounds and vibrations will become so prominent that you'll change the fan out just to regain some peace and quiet.
Processors may also overheat because the heat sink is not properly placed above the processor or the thermal paste is not of good quality or was applied incorrectly (or not at all) when the system was built. This is more likely to be a problem with home-built systems but can happen with commercially manufactured ones as well. The paste can break down over time, and you may need to reapply it.
Case design is another element that can contribute to or help prevent overheating. Cases with extra fans, better vents, and adequate room inside for good airflow may cost more but can provide superior cooling performance. Small cases that squeeze components together can cause overheating. For this reason, laptops with powerful processors are prone to overheating.
Tip
Another common reason for processor overheating is overclocking. Until heat begins to take its toll, overclocking does allow for significant performance improvements. Because processor overclocking can really cook a processor, most dedicated overclockers do not use regular processor fans. Instead, they use complex -- and expensive -- water-cooling systems.
2. Bad RAM
Several situations can lead to RAM-related performance problems with a particular machine:
- RAM timing is slower than optimal machine spec.
- RAM has minor flaws that appear only on detailed testing.
- RAM is overheating.
- There is insufficient RAM.
In the past, no one worried about RAM chips getting hot, because they didn't seem to generate much heat. But that's changed with newer RAM types, especially SDRAM. To check for overheating, open your computer's case, power down, and pull the plug out. Ground yourself and touch the plastic on one of your RAM chips. Ouch! They get pretty hot. If you find that your RAM chips are overheating, you should consider buying a separate fan to cool your memory. If your motherboard doesn't support a RAM fan, you might be able to get enough additional cooling by installing a fan card that plugs in to a PCI slot.
Of course, one common reason for poor performance that's related to RAM is simply not having enough of it. Modern operating systems such as Windows 7 and today's resource-hungry applications, combined with our increasing tendency toward extreme multitasking, result in a need for more RAM. The minimal specified system requirements may not cut it if you're doing lots of multimedia or running other memory-intensive applications. 32-bit Windows is limited to using 4 GB of RAM, but 64-bit Windows 7 can handle from 8 to 192 GB, depending on the edition. If your system allows, adding more RAM can often increase performance.
3. Hard disk issues
Traditional hard drives are mechanical devices that eventually wear out. There are many signs of imminent failure before a hard disk finally gives up. Some of these signs include:
- Slow access times on the affected drive.
- An increasing number of bad sectors when running scandisk and chkdsk.
- Unexplained Blue Screens.
- Intermittent boot failures.
- An "Imminent Hard Disk Failure" warning.
When you notice the system slowing down, run scandisk or chkdsk, depending on your operating system. If you notice a bad sector where a good sector existed earlier, that's a clue that the disk is going bad. Back up the data on the disk and prepare for it to fail soon. Make sure you have a spare disk ready so you can replace it when it fails or replace the disk as soon as you notice the early signs of failure.
Disk noise and scandisk/chkdsk are your best indicators for identifying a failing drive that's leading to a system slowdown. However, if you are managing a system remotely, or you can't take the system down for a full chkdsk/R, you can use tools that monitor disk health, such as Executive Software's DiskAlert.
You may also get a warning message from SMART hard drives that failure is imminent. Sometimes, you'll get these warnings when the hard drive is fine, due to problems with the hard drive device driver, the chipset driver, or the way the BIOS interfaces with the drive. Check for newer versions of the drivers and BIOS firmware.
Even if it's operating properly, your hard disk may be a bottleneck that's slowing down the rest of your system. See the next item for more information on what you can do about that.
4. Disk type and interface
Once upon a time, buying a hard drive to work with your system was easy. Today, things are more complicated, with many types of drives available, offering differing levels of performance. Most modern motherboards will support more than one type.
For best performance, you may want to dump the old IDE PATA type drives and upgrade to SATA, which comes in several speeds from 1.5 Gb/s to 6 Gb/s. Obviously, the faster drives will also be more expensive. Some new computers also have eSATA connectors for attaching a SATA drive externally. Other options for attaching drives externally include USB and Firewire/IEEE 1394.
Slowdowns may be caused by installing programs or often-used files on slow external drives. If you must use external drives for such files, go with the latest version, such as USB 3.0 (which is up to four times faster than USB 2.0) or Firewire 800. If you don't have ports to support the faster version, you can install a card to add support.
New Solid State Drives (SSDs), which generally connect via SATA, can often provide better performance than other drive types, but cost much more per GB of storage space. Windows 7 includes support for TRIM, which optimizes SSD performance. SCSI drives are still around, too, notably in the form of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) with super fast access times -- but they're expensive and noisy and used primarily for servers.
5. BIOS settings
One frequently ignored cause of system slowdown is the machine's BIOS settings. Most people accept the BIOS settings as they were configured in the factory and leave them as is. However, slowdowns may occur if the BIOS settings do not match the optimal machine configuration. Often, you can improve machine performance by researching your motherboard's optimal BIOS settings, which may not be the same as the factory defaults.
There is no centralized database of optimal BIOS settings, but you can employ a search engine such as Google or Bing and use your motherboard name and BIOS as keywords to find the correct settings.
