You get use to the feel and responsiveness of your computer. So it was a surprise to find that my system started running slowly.
Symptoms
- On selecting various items on my desktop, there would be a slight delay before anything would happen. For example, on selecting a menu from the menu bar, or clicking the red Close icon in the top-right corner of a window. The delay was ‘only’ about half a second, but enough time to be noticeable.
- Drop-down windows would appear gradually. For example, if I selected the Edit menu, the menu would appear to fade-in gradually, making it look animated. If I moved from drop-down menu to menu, the delay would make it frustrating to browse through them.
- Moving windows around my desktop was very slow. If I clicked on the blue title bar of my browser, and held down the mouse button, on moving the window fairly fast, I would see ‘comet-like’ tracks behind the window’s movement, as the PC struggled to update the display. Every few seconds the display would freeze for an extra half second, making the movement of windows seem to jump across the screen.
- On playing videos, the video would occasionally freeze for a fraction of a second.