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Now that you have ruled out viruses, bacteria, and hardware/software incompatibilities, what else could be making your computer slow?

Have you heard of Moore’s Law? Moore’s Law is a principle which Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore came up with in 1965, which states that computing power doubles every 18 months. That means every 18 months, computers are supposed to get twice as fast.

For many a year, this has held true, although lately the ratio is slipping. But the basic principle is that there are so many incredible advances in technology, we will have constantly increasingly fast computers as time goes by, and perhaps you have experienced this yourself.

Ah, for the reason they don’t tell you, which I have dubbed Phillips’ Law, in honor of, me!

Phillips’ Law states, no matter how fast your computer system may be, it will become proportionately slower due to the increased demands users place on it, exacerbated by inefficiencies in software architecture.

What does that mean?

Simply put, the faster your computer gets, the more you’ll demand from it, and the demand outpaces its ability to keep up. Result? Slow computing.

For example, in 1991 a fast computer could draw circles, squares, rectangles, and make simple brochures fairly quickly. These same tasks today are a snap and very quick on today’s computers.

However, today’s computers are tasked with greater and greater amounts of work – instead of spending a morning creating simple line art, today’s systems are asked to render full 3D versions of products. So while they are actually much faster at doing work, they are doing much more work than ever before.

Another way of putting this would be a comparison to racing. Suppose you had an old racing horse. It could run around the track fairly quickly, but if you put a small pack on its back, it would slow down considerably.

So you buy a younger, faster racing horse. This one will be quick, right! But you think, well he is so fast and strong, I think I will put three packs on his back. When he runs around the track with 3 packs on his back, he is just as slow as the older horse. This is exactly what we do with our computers, and is at the heart of the speed problem.

Add to this the fact that operating systems, and software, are increasingly left bloated and inefficient (due to increased market demands to get the product out the door), and you have a problem that gets worse and worse over time.

Hopefully now you have a better handle on why your computer is so slow, and what you can do to fix it. Sadly, if your system is more than 3 years old it is very possible you simply need to upgrade it completely, or else reload all the software and then only load software it can handle easily. Then, and only then, will you have a “fast” computer. For a little while. Until Phillips’ Law kicks in.

Until next time, we’ll solve our problems Bit by Bit.