Slow PC: find the bottleneck first
| Measure before guessing | |
| The usual three | |
| When to reinstall | |
| Heat slows everything | |
| Rule out malware fast |
Measure before guessing
Open Task Manager, Performance tab, and look for the red line: disk pinned at 100 percent, RAM exhausted into pagefile, or one CPU core maxed by a single process. Guessing («must be viruses») wastes the afternoon; one screenshot of the graphs points at the real bottleneck in ten seconds.
The usual three
Spinning hard drive instead of SSD — the single biggest speedup per dollar is still the SSD swap. Autostart zoo: disable everything except security software and re-enable on demand. Browser with forty tabs and three ad-laden extensions: each tab is a process, treat them like one.
When to reinstall
Reinstall when the system is years of layered cruft and you have backups plus license keys in hand — not as the first idea. A measured bottleneck (dying HDD with reallocations, 4 GB RAM in 2026) is a hardware ticket, and no amount of reinstalling fixes hardware.
Heat slows everything
Dust-clogged fans throttle the CPU exactly when load peaks, which feels like «slow Windows». Listen for the fan at full blast under light load, check temperatures with any monitor, and blow out the heatsinks yearly — five minutes with compressed air beats any software tune-up on a hot machine.
Rule out malware fast
One full scan with updated definitions plus an autoruns review settles the question in under an hour. Unknown entries launching from temp folders or user AppData get disabled first and asked about later. If the scan is clean and the graphs are calm, it is cruft, not crime — proceed to the usual three.