Slow Computer Northamptonshire?

It happens to all of us at times, our computers start to run slower and slower, we put up with it for a while but sooner or later it just gets so bad that we can’t stand it any longer and have to do something about it. For me, the crunch point came when I tried to open an OpenOffice document and was able to make an entire cup of tea before the computer was able to open the document. Now that is slow! and it’s a problem that is not just confined to Northamptonshire either!

So, computers that run slowly are a real pain but what causes it to happen in the first place and isn’t there just some sort of switch or setting we can use on our computer or hard drive that makes it run faster? Well i wish there was but the sad answer is no. Computers will run slow for many reasons and there are many causes. Some of the more common causes of slow running machines are below

Bad Hard Disk: Hard disk drives store all our data but they are not perfect. They can break. A very popular way this happens is for them to develop bad sectors. Bad sectors are parts of a hard drive that the computer finds difficult to or can no longer access. If these bad sectors don’t contain any information it doesn’t matter and hard disks today are smart enough to be able to identify bad sectors and automatically swap them our for good sectors without the computer user noticing. Bad sectors on a hard drive on become noticeable when the are no more good sectors left for the hard drive to swap with. Once this has happened the bad sectors just build and build and performance of the computer will suffer as the bad sectors take over the hard disk and make the computer run slower and slower. Bad sectors spread very quickly across a hard disk and if you think you’ve got bad sectors it’s a good idea to turn your computer off and seek advice about what you should do next. There’s a good explanation or bad sectors here: http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/recovery-hard-disk-drive-bad-sectors/ and if you are located in Northampton or Cambridge, Corby, Kettering, Leicester, Rushden, Peterborough or Towcester you can even get them to sort the problem out for you by going here http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery-northampton/

So how can you tell if your hard drive has got bad sectors or is going to have a bad sector problem before it actually happens and you loose data? There are two main ways you can use. Either take your computer or hard drive into a specialist like dataclinic above, and ask them to check it over for you – it’s a job that shouldn’t take too long. A decent hard drive firm should be able to identify hard disks with bad sectors in a matter of minutes. Another method you can try is to download some software that will test your hard drive and benchmark its performance. Typical programs like DiskBench will also test the drive for bad sectors whilst assessing its performance.