Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello everybody, welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Polette, IM an editor here at how Stuff Works. Sitting next to me as usual as senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Hey there,
today we're we're gonna deviate from the norm. Normally, Jonathan and I meet to talk about what we're gonna do for our podcasting before we sit down on the microphone. But this time someone else threw us. Threw us a suggestion, we thought we'd answer the question. Yeah. Listener Jake Suffian wrote in and asked a question that we thought was a good one, So we decided to tackle it, and he wrote, I'm always worry about leaving too many applications
open at a time. I've heard that it's better to close them than to keep and to keep the speed of my computer up. But if I do keep them open, is this at all bad bad in quotations for the computer in the long run. So we thought we'd hit this because a lot of people are curious, you know,
what is it that makes their computer slow. Um, you know a lot of people do have a lot of applications open at a time at c s. During the key note, one of the executives from from Microsoft said that while designing Windows seven, um, they did it with one with one particular thing in mind, which is that the average user has between five and fifteen windows open
at a time. And is that windows or applications. There'll be windows, so you might have two different say Internet Explorer windows open at a time, and multiple tabs within each windows. So it might be it is five to fifteen instances of applications, I guess you could say, but you figured that's an average. That means they are outliers. So there are people who have a lot more applications open than that, and there are people who may only do one at a time. Um, so is this bad
for your computer? Do you want to give the short answer? No, there you go, So for of you want to listen and on the rest of it, let's let's take a little journey here. Um. So, yeah, the short answer is that having lots of applications open is not really bad for your computer, not not on its own. Now, there are complications that can arise and things that can make your computer run more slowly, but it's not going to
hurt your computer, not permanently anyway. So part of the reason of that is that you know, you you may run a lot of applications, you notice that your memory usage is starting to suffer because of it. It's it's
using a lot of your computer's memory. Each application you open requires computer memory to run, and you may not necessarily sorry to interrupt, No, no, necessarily uh look to see I mean you may not be needing to to hit control to lead and check exactly how much uh you know, the processes tab and see how much memory
each application is using. You could tell us sort of intuitively, because you'll be able to notice that the other applications are running much more slowly, and you're gonna go, okay, something's up. And some applications are more guilty of hugging memory than others. For example, anti virus software is uh, that's a huge drain on memory. Now, it's also something that we recommend you use because viruses will cause way more harm to your computer than running a lot of
applications at once. But while you run anti virus software, keep in mind that's gonna require a lot of your computer's resources. Uh, and don't don't use more than one because if you do, that's going to double that demand on your computer's resources. And multiple versions of or different versions of the same kind of software, like anti virus software or even anti spyware software. Uh, they don't always play well with each other. Yeah, they can cause your
computer to crash. They can. They can just cause everything to to freeze over and over. Um. It's good to pick a you know, a good anti virus, a good anti spyware software package and stick with it. Don't sit there and think, hey, more is better, because it's not there. There are a lot of things that affect your computer's memory. Obviously the physical amount of RAM you have uh in there, and there are other things too. I mean, you can max out the RAM that goes inside your computer, but um,
you know, you have other things going on. You have your processors, clock speed. Uh, your your computer maybe trying to handle things that that simply weren't designed for it. For example, I have an older um PC that I use at home simply for server purposes and to run the occasional application that only runs on Windows. Well, you know, if I have a five mega hurts uh penni UM four processor and I'm trying to run the latest gaming
software on it. That's gonna you know, it may barely run, but it's gonna take a lot more performance out of the machine because it's gonna it's gonna max out everything that's running on there. So I may have the RAM maxed out, and I mean at the processor, you know, using as many cycles as it can handle. But right it's it's gonna run slowly and it's gonna appear you
know to uh to really have problems with it. Yeah, kind of chugs and little fits and starts if you if you don't have the the right kind of processor, if it's not powerful enough. Um. That's a good point that to bring up to. With processors. You might think, Hey, if I've got a lot of applications opening my processors running a lot more frequently, is that going to burn my processor out? Well? The nice thing about microprocessors is that when the manufacturers make these, they they put in
a limit on how fast that processor can go. So when you hear about your processors speed, that's kind of an artificial speed. It's one that they've instituted they being the the manufacturers, so that when you run these programs, it runs at a speed that it's capable of running out for prolonged periods of time without overheating and just breaking down. So as long as you're can computers ventilation system or cooling system is working properly, you should be
all right. Now. If you're one of those hardcore gamers who likes to over clock a CPU, and by overclock we mean you break through those limits, you allow the CPU to process at its actual maximum processing speed as opposed to the one that was the limit that was placed on it. Uh, then you run into the chance of overheating your computer, or at least overheating your microprocessor, and that can cause hardware failures or crashes, instability, that
kind of thing. Um. But if you're if you're if you haven't overclocked your CPU, it should be pretty much taking care of making sure that it's not gonna melt down or anything on its own. If you're something else that I just thought about. If you are, um, if you're running a PC or actually any kind of computer and you are concerned about the amount of processing power you're using, or whether or not you're maxing out your
memory and slowing your peter down. UM. Consider other things that might be affecting it, like do you have a large desktop picture or desktop? Um? Are you using any kind of customization software for your icons or your cursor or anything like that. I mean, those things are just little things that you might have installed and you think, oh, well, you know it's just my cursor. Well, and your computer is trying to render that you know, fancy uh customization
software and that that kind of thing. Those are little things that you can cut back on if you are worried about whether or not your computer is being overtaxed um, and that might help you, you know, cut back on some of the process or excess processor cycles too. Yeah. And there's this little stuff. Yeah. And in the same vein, if you put a lot of um of programs on your on your desktop or or files or whatever so
that you can access them from your desktop. Each time you do that, that's another file that your computer has to be able to process and and handle every time you boot up your computer. So if you're one of those people, as a desktop that just is covered with with files and you're wondering why your computer is taking so long to boot up. That may be a contributing factor.
So for those of us who like to keep an uncluttered desktop, um, we actually have faster boot times in general, assuming nothing else is wrong with our computers of course, And um, you know anything else that you might have instell in the background anything. If you're a Windows usually might see this stuff in the system tray. Um, you know some of this stuff you you open and it loads, and you think, well, I don't have a running because
you don't see it in the in the task bar. Well, you know, some of that stuff is still running in the background. And as I said before, if you hit control the leade, you can look and see what those other processes are and you might be surprised how much stuff is actually technically running on your computer even though it doesn't appear you know, in that in that bar, right, yeah, And that that can definitely affect your computer's performance as well.
And we should also mention that there are certain programs, particularly web browsers, that have had problems traditionally with memory leaks. And by that what we mean is, let's say you have an older version of Firefox, so Firefox too are older, and you open up several tabs, and Firefox, each tab your opening is putting another um kind of a drain on your computer's memory, and if you have a lot of those tabs open, it puts more of a drain. Well.
With Firefox, one of the problems was that even when you closed out individual tabs. So let's say you've got twenty tabs open in your browser and you start to close them out, the leak would still be there. The drain on your computer's memory would still be there. So even though you'd be quite quitting out of all these individual tabs as a whole, the browser is still putting
a big demand on your computer. So, uh, the later browsers have pretty much kind of worked this out, so it doesn't do that quite so dramatically as it used to. But that's another thing to keep in mind. Like, the only way you could really take care of that Firefox problem was to quit out of your browser completely and then open it again, and then that would pretty much reset the memory usage. But yeah, be odd because you're like, I only have one tab open and it's not even
on a flash based site. There's nothing that it should be. You know, it shouldn't be pulling this much memory and then yet you would look in your and your test manager and there it was so um. Fortunately, like I said, a lot of the later ones have addressed this problem. But that's another possible issue if your computer is going very slowly. Yeah, but to uh, to go back to the question in hand, it um, it doesn't really hurt your computer to have all this stuff running. It's just
slowing you down. And of course, you know, if you overtax your computer and you've got a big project open and you haven't saved it in a while and something crashes, well, you know, you may regret having all that extra stuff open. Yeah, So there are reasons to kind of limit the number of applications who have opened. Mainly, the more you have, the more Windows has to assuming you're using a PC, the you know, any operating system has to do this,
but most people tend to use Windows. So the more applications you have opened, the more Windows has to make sure that everything's playing nicely with each other. And not all programs do that because you know, it's it's hard to plan for every contingency, so sometimes programs just don't work very well when other programs are running at the same time. So every time you're opening up an application, you need to remember, Okay, well there's the chance that
this could cause my system to crash. Uh. You know, it's not a big chance, it's not huge, but it does it is a possibility. And before we finish, I guess we should also quickly talk about the registry file registry. So you may have seen errors that were registry errors. Might wonder what that is. Well, the registry file is like a database. It is Windows way of keeping track of what applications and settings there are on your computer
at any particular time. So every time you add a program or application to your computer, uh, it creates an entry in your registry file. Every time you uninstall, if you uninstalled properly, then it removes the entry. But their problems arise when you do things like let's say you just delete a file. You don't uninstall the program, but you just you know, go to the folder and you delete it manually. It may not be reflected in your
registry file. And then when Windows starts loading things up and it starts looking for this program that no longer is there, but it according to the registry, it should be there. That's where you start having registry errors. So a lot of this is preventable. I mean, you just you just have to make sure that you are installing and removing applications in ways that Windows is aware of
what you're doing. So you're either uninstalling or you're going to the ad removed programs in your in your Windows Manager. And uh, that's the best way to take care of these issues. And uh, of course, the other big point I guess I should make is be smart when you're on the web because malware like viruses, trojan, spyware, that kind of stuff that can slow your computer down as well. Um, and you're certainly not going to see that in your taskbar. No, no,
not if they know what they're doing. Virus that little skull crosses on the eyes, I wonder if that's bad. Um, So yeah, just be careful where you go on the web because that you know that you could easily download some malware and that could seriously slow down your computer. But as for the applications, uh, you know, go to town, have fun. Just remember it can make your computer unstable, but it does not actually hurt your machine run. No, not in the long run. You can pretty much anything
you do as long as it's not like malware. Uh, it's not gonna cause your computer irreparable harm. You may get to a point where everything is so frozen that you have to go to an earlier backup, So this is a good time to remind you to back up your system. But you're never going to get to a point where that is what's going to cause your computer to me down, at least not as far as I know.
There may be something out there where some wow, I had the perfect storm and now the inside of my computer is goog, but it would be news to me your allege may very some restrictions apply exactly. Well, that's uh. I think that's pretty much wraps our discussion up. Thank you very much Jake for writing in, and uh, everyone out there, I mean, if you have questions, please feel free podcasts at how stuff works dot com. We're happy to answer your questions. We love getting that mail, um,
especially when it's complimentary. And and for those of you who are wondering, I do blush. So thank you very much, And if you want to learn more about all things computer and tech related, visit how stuff works dot com and we'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camry. It's ready, Are you