No matter how good your internet connection is, you won’t be able to enjoy its full potential if your computer is slow.

Troubleshooting your computer may be where your work lies.

But before we start this troubleshooting process, let’s look a little further into how your computer speed affects your internet speed and the options you have. 

Here are the impacts a slow computer has on your internet speed.

Takes Longer to Connect to the Internet

If you have a slow computer, it’ll definitely lead to a slow connection speed to the internet.  Think about it for a second, one of the resources that a slow computer is lacking is memory.  

Connecting to the internet does consume memory, particularly if the website has a lot of graphics on it. 

Just opening the web browser will be a challenge because it’s a window that’ll be opened in memory.  If your computer is low on memory, or the hard drive is almost full or the processor is old, your computer will have to do more work just to open that browser.

Some suggestions for troubleshooting that slow computer of yours.

First, make sure you have the latest updates for your operating system and software programs.  Out-of-date software can cause performance issues, so be sure to check that to see if there are any critical updates available for the OS and/or software.

Second, close any programs that you’re not using.  If it’s one thing a slow computer cannot handle, is having too many programs running at the same time.  Keeping multiple running programs to a minimum will improve the performance of your computer.

My third suggestion requires a bit more hands-on troubleshooting, and that is to add more memory to your computer if it’s possible.  This will definitely improve performance for sure and speed up your computer.

Adding more memory requires you to open the computer and install the memory chip.  If you’re not comfortable doing this yourself, contact a local tech company to help with that.

Here’s a short video showing how to upgrade RAM (Random Access Memory) in your PC.

Webpages Load a lot Slower

We live on the web these days for both personal and professional reasons.

We can stream our favorite shows, browse social media (the ones that aren’t exclusive to just our smartphones), and do our work on the internet without any lag time.  But when a website takes a long time to load, it makes those activities a bit difficult.

We all can relate to that pain, right?

Well, here’s what’s going on when we go out to a website.

When you type in a website address, your computer has to find the server that hosts the website and then request the page from that server.  The speed of your computer affects how quickly it can find the server, request the page, and receive a response.  If your computer is slow, that entire process is impacted.

The same troubleshooting tips will apply here, as in the above section.  But I’ll start you off here with the simplest of troubleshooting methods.

Rebooting your computer. 

Many issues dealing with a slow computer have been solved by doing a quick reboot.  Sometimes when a computer has been on for too long and hasn’t been rebooted in a while, doing a reboot will clear out any opened programs that you were not able to see initially.  

Download Speeds are Slower

The internet is a vast and wonderful thing.  We’ve already mentioned that we love to stream shows, check social media and do our work from the internet. 

But let’s not forget about downloads.

Yes, we still download data from the internet, and in large chunks too.  Although cloud computing has exploded in recent years, there are still programs that require a local install on your computer.

If your computer is slower than usual, this will definitely affect how fast you can download apps and data from the internet.

There are a few things you can do to improve the download speed of your computer.

You can also try clearing your browser cache.

This is the temporary data that websites store on your computer so they load faster when you visit them again.  However, over time, this cache can build up and slow down your browser.  Clearing it out can help speed things up.

Here’s how you can clear out your browser’s cache in Chrome.

1. Click on the Tools menu in the upper right-hand corner.  These are the three dots beside your account picture.
2. Select More Tools and then Clear browsing data.
3. When that window opens, you have a few options to choose from. 
4. Under Basic, you can choose the time frame that you want.  Your options there are “Last hour” to “All Time”.  You can also select from the three options of Browsing History, Cookies and Other Site Data, and Cached Images and Files (that’s the one we’re looking for).
5. Under Advanced, I’d recommend you leave the defaulted ones checked.
6. Click on clear data.

Close out the browser when you’re done and see if that improves the download speed.

Best Remedy for a Slow Computer

As you can see that a slow computer does slow down your internet speed in various ways.

If there’s potential for parts to be upgraded on your computer (i.e. more RAM, better hard drive) as we demonstrated above.  Then, by all means, go ahead and upgrade what you can on your computer to improve its speed.

Although the cost may vary, depending on the quality of the parts you’re upgrading.  So that’s definitely something to keep in mind, particularly when comparing it to getting a new computer.

And in my opinion, that is probably the best remedy for a slow computer.

It’ll save you a lot of time and money, in the long run.  This is especially true if your computer is over 5 years old, which is the average lifespan of a computer or laptop these days.

There are lots of great deals online that are available for new computers.  So feel free to start there to gather as much information as you can about prices in comparison to performance.