When it comes to our computers we want them to be in tip-top shape. We all want them to load web sites at the fastest speeds possible. Let’s just face it; we demand the technology to be faster and faster because in our lives we are so busy we don’t have the patience to be inconvenienced in the simplest tasks like pulling up a web page really quick. This means that we want our machines to run like they should with no problems and start up in a reasonable amount of time. We can do everything that is in our powers to achieve this like: do all our computer maintenance properly, keep our updates current, remove old unused programs, and defragment the hard drive properly. Still when using our computer to surf the internet we seem to still have a slow computer from time to time when going to specific sites. Why? How can we do everything right and in our powers and still have a computer that lags with simple computations like pulling up a web page?

Well first thing is first. You need to understand that it is not your fault. There are just some things that we do not have control over in how our computers run when it comes to the internet. There are many, many other factors involved when we depend on the internet to deliver the exchange of information to us. These are uncontrollable factors like: the internet provider, provider technologies used, programmers, servers, and security. Many things can contribute to the reliability of your computer and we need to understand probably one of the most frustrating ones, the web site itself.

Without getting to in depth with details and abbreviations that would leave us saying “Wait come again”, generally speaking the main contribution to our slow computer is the way the individual web site is designed and laid out. When programmers write web sites sometimes the site gets very congested with ads, links, headers, information, news, titles, images so on and so forth. All of this information is data that our computers have to download and process. Again we see a direct relationship the more that our computers have to download the longer it can take for our computer to open the page. When we go to one of these sites that is jammed packed with information that is clustered and busy we tend to see the site size almost triple from the average site size. With new ideas in how to build web pages more efficiently and new techniques used in our most common sites the load times are improved. The general rule of thumb stands that the more on the site: images, information, videos, flash pictures, etc. The longer the site will take to load up. We still need to make sure we keep up on routine computer maintenance but at least we can start to have an understanding of the things we cannot control that contribute to our slow computer.