Is your computer slow?
Does it struggle when you want to do anything? Does it keep doing things you didn’t want it to do?
There are a lot of reasons why this might be the case; at ISCAdigital we see laptops, desktops, macs, and all sorts of things come in with this problem, and while every case is different, there are a few common problems we see often.
Malware
A lot of the time a computer can be slow because of malware, either trying to get your attention via ads and tricking you into giving its creators money, or more insidiously using your computer to spam other people, or any number of other nefarious deeds. This can be fixed by removing the malware; some times this can be easier than others; sometimes a full reinstall may be needed before the problem is resolved. Unfortunately, antiviruses don’t catch everything, but we can maximise your chances in the future. A full malware clean at ISCAdigital costs £70, and we normally expect to have it back to you within 1-3 working days. If you’d prefer to do it yourself, Adwcleaner and Malwarebytes can often do a good job, though we often need to compliment them with manual removal of more stubborn things. It’s important to note that, despite popular opinion, nowadays this can very much affect Macs in the same ways it does Windows.
Failing Hard Drive
Hard drives are far and away the most common thing we see fail in computers that come into our shop, and they can produce some very strange symptoms, primarily relating to slow operation or failing to start windows/osx or certain applications. Fortunately it’s very easy for us to detect this problem, and it can be rectified within 2-3 days depending on the size of your drive. Labour is a flat £70, with hardware prices as follows:
- 250GB SSD: £30
- 500GB SSD: £50
- 1TB SSD: £80
- 2TB SSD: £150
Low RAM
Most modern laptops come with at least 4GB of RAM, which should be enough for most tasks for the majority of people. Laptops over 5-6 years old may have 2GB or less RAM. Either way, RAM is usually a simple matter to replace; if you’d like more RAM, or we suggest that it might be needed in your situation, we charge a flat fee of £29 on top of hardware costs, which you can expect to be around £5/GB in most instances – though prices have fluctuated dramatically in the past!
Other Weak Components
Sometimes computers just don’t have very good hardware – cheap laptops almost always come with poor processors such as Intel’s Celeron or AMD’s E1 series. These can manage basic tasks, but will never handle anything particularly demanding, and are usually soldered to the board, or have very tight power thresholds, so they can’t be upgraded. A hard-drive however can be upgraded to an SSD for a fairly massive speed improvement – for any computers less than five years old which don’t yet have an SSD the boot-up times for instance may go from a couple minutes down to 10 or 20 seconds. We offer a 250GB SSD upgrade for £100 including installation, 500GB SSD for £120, or £150 for a 1TB (1000GB).