So your computer is running slow and your not sure why?  A good place to start is see which applications are using the resources in your computer (CPU or Central Processing Unit / RAM or Random Access Memory).  To do this follow the steps below:

1. Press all three buttons together (“ctrl” + “alt” + “del“) or right click on the start bar on the bottom of the screen and select ” Start Task Manager“.  For Windows 7 or Vista, after pressing “Ctrl” + “Alt” + “Del” you will have to select “Start Task Manager“.

2.  Now you will see the “Task Manager” screen.

3. Click on the tab that says “Processes“.  You will see many columns and the two that are most important for this purpose are “CPU” and “MEMORY“.  (see image below)

4. If you click on either of the tabs (RAM, CPU) it will sort lowest to highest and vice versa.  Order from highest to lowest and see which programs are requiring a lot of resources as their might be an issue with this program.

Note: “System Idle Process” is good, and under the CPU column, System Idle Process should be above 90%.  (That means that 90% is available for any tasks needed.  If it is much lower than that you have too many processes running.

If you are a Microsoft Outlook user, like many of my clients, your Outlook mail file (.pst file) get extremely large if you do not clear out your email folders on a regular basis.  Many clients I know like to keep their emails for years so they have records, but Outlook begins to run slow and have many error as these files grow.

If you plan to keep old emails what I would recommend is backing up your emails files every few months and then cleaning the files out within Outlook, so you have a record if needed but Outlook continues to run smoothly (or as smooth as possible).

There is an add-on from Microsoft for Outlook, click here for download information, that can make backing up your mail files a breeze.

After you download and install you simply:

1. Open Outlook

2. Select the “File” menu

3. Click “Backup”

4. Select the Folders you want to back up, the location to save them (preferably an external drive), and click “ok“.

5. Once the process has finished verify you have the back up files where you selected to back them up to, then delete the files in Outlook that are not needed.

6.  Right click on “Deleted items” in Outlook and “Empty Deleted Items” to permanently delete these messages and free up space and hopefully eradicate some Outlook errors.

Hopefully that helps you clean up some errors and reduce your overall mailbox (.pst file) size.