Why is my Microsoft Windows computer slow?

A new Fort Wayne computer repair client asked me for help today. They were complaining of a computer which used to be fast and now is slow. I started the investigation and found that there was only two GigaBytes of RAM and I mentioned that four would be better. The hard drive specifications were checked next and the 80 GB hard drive was half full which is ok. The fuller a hard drive is, the slower it generally is. The fragmentation status was checked next and I found the hard drive hasn’t been defragmented for ten months so I started the process. Fragmentation happens when a hard drive gets disorganized with fragments of a file get spread across a hard drive. The defragmentation process reorganizes the hard drive by placing the file fragments back together which is supposed to make reading the hard drive faster and therefore the computer faster. Next, the startup processes were examined and two of them were disabled because I deemed them unneeded. The computer is faster now, but I suggested to the client that a new computer was in order. This was because of the age of the computer and the RAM and Hard drive size were too small.