Facebook suddenly got incredibly slow and buggy. I asked others nearby about it - no, they hadn’t noticed anything. So, possibly something was wrong with my computer. And other things got slow too.

So, time to trouble shoot. I started thinking back - what had changed? What I had noticed was that the fan was on a lot more, and a lot faster (this is a laptop). So, maybe it overheats a bit. Too much dust? Had it gotten too hot one day and damaged? I still didn’t know. So I started running my hand around the back. And right away, it clicked! I’d changed desks. I had a big LCD screen for the other computer that was right behind the laptop. The new desk had less space, and everything was closer together. The base of the screen had a slope on it. A lot of hot air got trapped in that space and not dissipating fast enough. So, how to solve that? I happened to have a genius half shelf meant for a kitchen cupboard that I’d gotten from Ikea:

I put the screen on the shelf, letting the exhaust air from the fan blow under the shelf. The screen is too high up to use as is, but I can always bring it down off the shelf when I’m using the other computer.

But still, after I’d done that, the computer was still slow. So, I hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up task manager and looked at resources. Turns out one of the processors was going at least 50 percent. It used a lot of memory too. Checking processes, it turned out to be Firefox. I had several tabs open plus a PDF file, and I’d had it open for a long time. Firefox can be a bit of a resource hog, and the longer it stays up, the more tabs you’ve had open, the worse it gets. It turned out that even when I closed the program, the process still kept going - even though task manager didn’t show the Firefox program running, so I had to close the process manually, then restart.

I’ll have to watch the resources if it starts to heat up, because both over heating, memory usage and continual processor load can affect speed and responsiveness of the computer.

I hope this helped someone?