Dust sneaks its way into Laptops

Dust is a forgotten enemy when it comes to computer maintenance!

No matter what you do (unless you have a high tech lab) you’ll end up with dust all over any room and it gets attracted to computers in two different ways:

1. Static from the monitor attracts it with magnetism
2. Computer fans need to suck in air constantly and dust is always floating around

Why does dust slow a laptop down?

It coats the fans used for cooling the hot components down and they become less effective as air doesn’t flow around the heat sinks as much.  It’s like the hottest parts of your computer are wearing a furry coat!

If anything gets too hot internally in laptops the whole system has to slow itself down using less power (and generating less heat).

If you took the time to take apart the laptop then you can easily remove all of the dust with a soft paper towel or cotton bud, you may want a professional to do this if you are unsure or worried about taking your laptop apart!  It shouldn’t cost more than £5 ($8) so don’t let a computer technician rip you off.

An added bonus of removing the dust on fans/heat-sinks is that the fans can run at a much slower speed using less power and more importantly make a lot less annoying whirring noise.

Don't start up loads of program at once

When you switch your laptop on how long do you have to wait until you can properly use it?  Even if you do stop a lot of programs from starting up with Windows things can be painfully slow when you computer is getting upto speed.

Behind the scenes lots and lots of little programs run themselves when you start Windows from boot up plus your internet card is trying to connect to the internet and your anti-virus may be updating itself.

If you try and open your browser, music player, email client etc. whilst the computer is still starting up then expect a computer traffic jam!

This bottle neck effect will jam up the processor as it has 40 or so jobs to do at once already.  If you keep making it run extra programs then it’ll do each job bit by bit and the overall time it takes is a lot longer that if they all ran separately.

The best thing to do is be patient, go and make yourself a cup of tea or do some stretches whilst your laptop wakes up from it’s slumber!

Want to time how long it takes to get upto speed with your laptop?  Try pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL at any time and you’ll bring you the task manager:

You can see on the “Performance” tab what percentage of your processor is being used every second.  When it gets to a steady 1 – 5% usage then you can open up other programs and avoid any bottle necking.  Another good indicator of when your computer is not extremely busy with programs is when the hard drive stops making that annoying ticky sound.  When new SSD technology comes out for hard drives this problem will be a thing of the past, bring on the new technology!

P.S. You can use the task manager to see what “Processes” are taking up the most memory and processor power if Windows is being consistantly slow