Does your work PC feel slower than it used to? Do your team members complain about sluggish computers that take forever to boot up, or that lock up once they’re running with no explanation?
Before you sign off on a costly upgrade cycle, it’s worth exploring whether the PCs are truly too old and slow — or whether they can keep serving you well with some small adjustments.
There’s one small move that can make a serious difference in your PC’s performance, so we always recommend trying it before moving on to more expensive solutions like replacing your entire fleet of desktops and laptops.
Here’s what you need to know about why PCs seem to slow down — and how cleaning up your startup folder can turn things around.
Do PCs Slow Down As They Age?
There’s a notion out there that says our computers get slower the longer we use them. Some even go so far as to say that PC makers intentionally slow down their older products to entice you to buy new ones. (This isn’t really happening, but it sure makes for clickable headlines!)
So what’s going on here? Do PCs actually slow down as they age?
Yes and no. But mostly no.
Certain components in a PC (the ones that move, typically) can physically slow down. If you still have a physical hard disk drive (you probably don’t, and if you do, you probably know it), the motor powering those spinning disks can wear out over time, slowing down the drive’s RPM and thus slowing down your computer. But the power hit here is minimal.
While it’s true that PCs can seem to slow down over time — what’s mostly happening is that the software and even the operating system on the PC are growing more advanced. They are built to take advantage of newer, faster hardware that in some cases has entirely new technology built in (like neural engines and performance cores and so on). You upgrade your software and OS to take advantage of new features and stay secure, but those upgrades don’t run as well on older hardware as the previous versions did.
So, because your hardware isn’t getting faster but your software/OS is demanding more, it looks and feels like your computer is slowing down.
App Overload and Startup Clutter
One thing that can grind your PC to a halt: trying to do too much at once. We’ve all experienced this; with 48 tabs open in a browser plus Word and Excel and Outlook all running, you try to open up some piece of industry-specific software (Adobe comes to mind), and your PC slows to a crawl.
But there’s a sneaky “doing too much at once” that might be happening behind the scenes: startup.
When you install new applications in Windows, some of them will put themselves into the Startup folder. This means they automatically launch as soon as you boot up your PC. It’s nice to not have to manually open apps that you use all the time, which is kind of the whole point of Startup.
But over time, lots of apps have a way of sneaking into Startup that don’t need to be there. So when you boot up Windows, it immediately gets bogged down trying to launch 27 applications, 19 of which you don’t even use regularly.
So how do you clean this up? First step is Task Manager. Open it (ctrl + shift + esc), then move to the Startup tab. Here you’ll see a list of everything that starts up when Windows does. If you see something you know isn’t needed, remove it. If you see items you can’t identify (try Googling the name), ask your IT provider. These could be essential, or they could potentially be security threats!
If you’re using Windows 11, another great option is to turn on notifications for anytime a new app adds itself to Startup. You can do this in System Settings. Click on System, then Notifications, then scroll down to Startup App Notification. Toggle this on, and now you’ll get a heads up when new things show up in Startup.
That’s it for this week. Can we help further troubleshoot your slowing PCs? Reach out to our team anytime.