Slow PC & Windows Performance Guides

A Windows PC rarely slows down for a single reason. The usual suspects are a drive pinned at 100% activity, a background process holding the CPU, a program that keeps allocating memory without releasing it, or a pile of startup apps that load before you can use the desktop. Updates add their own layer: a feature update can reset drivers, re-enable services or leave a half-finished install that keeps retrying in the background.

The guides below are organised by symptom, so start with the one that matches what you see in Task Manager. Each one shows how to confirm the cause first, with tools such as Resource Monitor, Event Viewer and Reliability Monitor, and only then the fix, starting with built-in Windows tools before anything that changes system settings. This section also covers everyday components that stop responding, such as File Explorer, the Start menu, search, sound and sleep mode.

If you have worked through the steps and the PC is still slow, a technician can connect remotely, find the bottleneck and tune the system for you.