Slow Booting Computer Fix – My Computer Doesn’t Want to Start Up

There are many reasons why a computer will start going slower over time. It is the normal order of things for a computer to start running more slowly as it is used. Getting back a computer’s speed it has lost from use is as often as easy as running a registry cleaner.

However, there are times when the computer loses its speed abruptly. When this happens it is often spyware or viruses behind it. The reason registry corruption will make your computer slow over time and viruses and spyware will slow your computer down abruptly is simply that registry corruption builds relatively slowly over time and viruses and spyware are large programs that enter a computer suddenly and alter its files quickly.

Registry corruption too, if it is let to build up, can slow a computer down tremendously. So it is important not to let registry corruption build up in your operating system. Make sure to nip it in the bud. Also your computer should be scanning for viruses and spyware daily.

The Good Old Days

The case of a slow booting computer can be a little bit different. Yes, registry corruption, Spyware and viruses may play a role in a computer that boots slowly, however one thing is often overlooked; and this is a fragmented hard drive.

You’ll probably remember in the early days of computers, defragging was commonplace. All computer manuals and technical periodicals recommended defragging at regular intervals. The reason for this is that as files grow on your hard drive they tend to be entered in a disorderly fashion.

Why? Because files get deleted from the hard drive and the next file that’s added takes the place of a file that was recently deleted. Since the file just deleted may have been physically far away from the last entry on the hard drive and the next entry gets added next to the last entry, these two entries, which could be part of the same program, will live far away from one another. This means a hard drive often has to look all over the place just to load one file.

When a computer is booting it is looking for files. If these files are scattered all over the hard drive the computer will boot slowly. This is why periodic defragging is still necessary even in today’s computers. The reason why most people don’t defrag anymore is because the defragmentation processes on today’s huge hard drives literally take all day long and then some. Therefore, it is necessary to use third-party software which will defragment a hard drive much more quickly than the Microsoft defragger that is part of the Windows operating system.

A computer that boots slowly could have issues other than just fragmented files. As we have discussed earlier, registry corruption, spyware, and viruses can be a reason for this. However if you’ve been keeping your computer free of these things and it seems to be slowing down anyway, especially when it’s loading a program or loading up the operating system as all computers do when they boot, you may want to try a defrag program. “Defragmentating the drive” sounds like a blast from the past but it is still an important part of computer maintenance.

By: Hiel Strassman

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