Slow Performance
Ageing hard drives are the number one cause of sluggish computers. An SSD upgrade drops boot times from several minutes to under 15 seconds, making an old laptop feel brand new without replacing the whole machine.
Answer 7 targeted questions and get an instant personalised diagnosis. Whether your computer is slow, crashing, infected or completely dead, our weighted scoring engine pinpoints the most likely cause in under two minutes. No sign-up, no email, 100% free.
Our quiz uses a weighted scoring engine trained on the most common PC faults seen in Perth. Here is how it produces an accurate result.
Each question is designed to isolate specific fault signatures. We ask about your main symptom, how it started, secondary symptoms, your PC's age, storage type, thermals, and usage. Every answer adjusts the internal score weights in real time.
Behind the scenes, six diagnostic categories each accumulate weighted points based on your answers. Symptom combinations that indicate multiple faults are handled correctly — for example, slow boot plus file errors strongly points to drive failure, not software.
The highest-scoring category becomes your primary diagnosis with a confidence percentage. Secondary possibilities are shown clearly. A pre-filled WhatsApp quote request opens in one tap so you can go from diagnosis to a real quote in under a minute.
Every symptom below can be properly diagnosed and fixed. Same day turnaround on most.
Ageing hard drives are the number one cause of sluggish computers. An SSD upgrade drops boot times from several minutes to under 15 seconds, making an old laptop feel brand new without replacing the whole machine.
Modern malware runs silently, capturing keystrokes or consuming resources. Professional removal clears deeply embedded threats that standard antivirus tools frequently miss entirely, including boot-sector infections.
From failed power supplies to motherboard faults, a component-level diagnostic identifies the exact failure. Your data is often safe even when the PC itself cannot be repaired, and recovery options are assessed first.
Blue screens are Windows protecting itself from hardware or driver faults. Reading the system event log identifies the root cause — whether that is failing RAM, bad drivers, corrupt system files, or overheating.
Dust and dried thermal paste cause thermal throttling, making a capable machine feel sluggish. A full internal clean and CPU repaste can drop operating temperatures by up to 30 degrees Celsius permanently.
Accidentally deleted files or a clicking hard drive require immediate action. Stop using the drive and bring it in. Recovery is possible from drives that appear completely failed in many cases, with a no-fix, no-fee guarantee.
When your computer starts misbehaving, the natural reaction is to assume the worst. Most Perth residents who walk through the door at FixMyPC have spent hours Googling symptoms, reading forum posts from 2014, and arriving at conclusions that range from "it's probably a virus" to "I need a completely new computer". The truth is almost always more specific, less scary, and far cheaper to fix than the internet would have you believe.
This quiz and guide exist to short-circuit that frustration. By answering seven targeted questions, the scoring engine weighs your specific combination of symptoms against the six most common fault categories we see every day in Perth: virus and malware infections, hardware component failure, storage drive degradation requiring an SSD upgrade, Windows corruption, overheating, and general software issues. The result is not a generic guess — it is the category that best matches your symptom fingerprint, with a confidence percentage calculated from the gap between your top two scores.
The single most common repair at FixMyPC Perth is an SSD upgrade. It is not even close. Roughly 94 percent of computers that come in labelled as "just slow" leave performing dramatically faster after a storage upgrade — no other parts replaced, no Windows reinstall required. The reason comes down to physics. A mechanical hard drive uses spinning magnetic platters and a read/write head that physically moves across them, like a vinyl record player. That mechanism has been roughly the same speed since the early 2000s.
Modern software, browsers, and operating systems have outpaced that speed by an enormous margin. Windows 11 alone performs hundreds of small read/write operations every minute during normal use. A mechanical drive simply cannot keep up. The result is that your processor, RAM, and even your graphics card spend most of their time idle, waiting for data to arrive from the drive. That is why an SSD upgrade feels so dramatic — you are not replacing the weakest part of your system; you are removing the bottleneck that was throttling every other component simultaneously.
After an SSD upgrade, boot times typically drop from two to five minutes to under fifteen seconds. Programs that took thirty seconds to open now open in two. The machine does not feel new because the hardware is new — it feels new because the hardware that was always capable is finally being allowed to run at its real speed.
Malware has evolved significantly over the last decade. The days of obvious pop-up storms and ransom demands are largely gone — modern infections are designed to be invisible. The most profitable malware today either mines cryptocurrency using your hardware silently in the background, harvests banking credentials as you type them, or rents access to your machine to a botnet for use in distributed attacks. None of these announce themselves.
The most reliable indicators of a background infection are: high CPU or RAM usage in Task Manager when no programs are open; a computer that runs significantly hotter than usual; Windows Defender or your installed antivirus refusing to open or reporting that it has been turned off; your browser homepage changing without permission; and contacts reporting that they have received strange messages or emails from your account. If you are experiencing two or more of these together, the likelihood of an active infection is very high.
Consumer antivirus tools catch the majority of common infections but struggle with infections that have been deliberately crafted to evade specific scanners. Professional malware removal uses multiple scanning tools including offline boot-time scanners, rootkit detectors, and manual inspection of startup entries and scheduled tasks to find things that real-time antivirus cannot see while Windows is running.
A PC that refuses to power on is alarming, but the most important thing to understand is that your files are almost certainly safe. In the overwhelming majority of cases where a computer will not start, the fault is in the power delivery or boot process — not in the storage device holding your data. The most common causes are a failed power supply unit, a dead CMOS battery preventing the board from initialising, a faulty motherboard, or in laptops, a failed charging circuit or a battery that has swollen and disconnected itself.
Even when the storage drive itself is the cause — a failed SSD preventing Windows from loading, for example — the data on that drive is almost always recoverable by removing it and reading it in a different machine. The key is not to attempt DIY repairs that might cause secondary damage. Bringing the machine in for a component-level diagnostic is the fastest and safest path to knowing exactly what has failed and what the realistic recovery options are.
Perth summers are among the hottest in any major Australian city, and indoor temperatures without air conditioning regularly exceed 35 degrees Celsius. PC cooling systems are designed around ambient temperatures, and a machine that runs adequately in a 20-degree environment will often begin thermal throttling in a 35-degree room even with clean fans. This is not a fault — it is the machine protecting itself. But it does mean that dust buildup and degraded thermal paste cause noticeable performance problems in Perth homes at a rate higher than in cooler climates.
Thermal paste between the CPU and its cooler is a heat-conducting compound that transfers heat away from the processor. It degrades over three to five years, becoming dry and less effective. Combined with dust that has built up in the heatsink fins and case vents, this can push a CPU to its thermal limit at moderate loads. The fix — a full internal clean and CPU repaste — is straightforward and typically drops idle temperatures by 15 to 20 degrees and load temperatures by 20 to 30 degrees, permanently resolving throttling and fan noise.
One of the biggest barriers to getting a computer repaired is uncertainty about cost. People either fear being overcharged without understanding what they are paying for, or they assume the repair will cost more than a replacement and do not bother asking. Neither of these needs to be true.
At FixMyPC Perth, every job receives a written upfront quote before any work begins. You know exactly what the repair will cost before committing. Virus removal starts from $80 and typically resolves in a single appointment. An SSD upgrade with full data transfer starts from $65 if you supply the drive, or from $150 with a Samsung or Crucial drive supplied and fitted. A clean Windows reinstall including a full data backup starts from $120. A complete diagnostic with a written report of all findings starts from $120. All prices include GST and there are no call-out fees for drop-off work.
As a general rule, if the repair costs less than 40 to 50 percent of what an equivalent replacement machine would cost new, and the computer is under seven or eight years old, repair almost always makes financial sense. Honest advice is given in every case — if a machine genuinely is not worth repairing, that is stated upfront rather than charging for work that will not last.
Four causes account for the overwhelming majority of slow computers in Perth. Here is how each one works and what fixes it.
Old mechanical drives degrade continuously. Even when healthy they are five to ten times slower than a modern SSD. An upgrade fundamentally changes how the machine feels — and it costs less than most people expect, with all data transferred across safely.
Many infections run silently, consuming CPU and RAM for crypto mining or data harvesting. A slow and hot PC with no obvious cause is a strong indicator of an active background infection that standard antivirus has already missed.
Years of software updates and registry changes leave broken entries and orphaned files that accumulate invisibly. A clean Windows reinstall removes all of it — and your files are backed up first, so nothing personal is lost in the process.
Modern browsers alone can consume 4 to 6 GB of RAM. If your machine has 4 GB or 8 GB it is likely struggling to keep pace with today's applications. A RAM upgrade allows genuine multitasking again without constant slowdowns.
These are the four most reliable indicators that your PC has an active infection rather than a hardware or software issue.
Homepages changing, random search redirects and new toolbars appearing without permission are classic browser malware indicators. These threats often survive reinstalling the browser and require professional removal to fully clear.
If Task Manager shows high CPU or RAM usage when nothing is open, malware is very likely running in the background. Crypto-mining infections are the most common cause of this specific pattern in Perth machines today.
Sophisticated infections disable Windows Defender or installed antivirus as their first action. If your security software will not open or stays turned off after being enabled, the system is almost certainly compromised.
If contacts report receiving strange emails or messages from your account that you did not send, your credentials have been harvested. Change passwords immediately and get the machine scanned before using any banking sites.
One of the most common concerns is not knowing whether a quote is fair. Here is a clear guide to what repairs realistically cost so you can walk in with full confidence and accurate expectations.
Straightforward answers to the questions Perth residents ask most often before bringing a computer in for repair.
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