It seems that lately, my nemesis has been slow computers. I've had three people in the last week or so ask me to look at their computers to see why they're running slower than they used to.

I do the usual things, scan for viruses (with two-four different programs), look for processes taking more than their share, check system specs, disabled startup applications through msconfig and autoruns, defragged, that sort of thing. But each time I end up with no explanation for why their system is running slowly.

In most cases I can tell that it should be running faster than it is. The last computer I worked on had decent specs, but for some reason it just chugged on most things.

What other things would you guys look at to see what might be causing a problem?


Secondary question: do any of you Chrome users know of a way to get better control over file downloads? Basically, I want Chrome to automatically attempt to download any file that's not a web site. For example, I love that Chrome can read PDFs natively, but I don't want it to open the file when I click a link. I want it to download it first, then open it when I double-click the file. I deal with a lot of PDFs, and doing the whole right-click, save as, chose location, etc is annoying when sometimes you have to download 10-20 files.

So far I haven't seen anything to help with this issue.

Thanks for your input on all of this...