Windows Slows Down Problem Solution

The most common source of this problem is a program eating up your CPU power or RAM. Sometimes it's a memory leak, which means that a program isn't releasing RAM that it's no longer using, which can snowball over time to occupy all available memory. Restarting the program should fix the leak temporarily, but the long-term solution usually requires the program's creator to produce a new version.

Other times, it can be a scheduled virus scan running in the background, or even a virus or other malware.

To check background programs, press Ctrl + Shift + Esc, which opens the Task Manager. You can click the labels at the top of each column to sort alphabetically, or by CPU or RAM usage. Save your documents or whatever else you were working on at the time. Then, if a program is eating up your resources and you don't recognize it, Google its name to determine its danger level. If it's not supposed to be there, you may need to manually run a virus scan to remove it. Or you may just be able to right-click the program in the Task Manager list and select End Process. In some cases, simply rebooting can make sluggishness issues disappear.