Why is my Chrome browser running so slow?
Short answer:
Long answer:
I’ve been traveling and using my Dell XPS laptop extensively. I noticed that its performance has been getting sluggish, particularly while running the Chrome browser. Page loads were very slow.
Started looking at the usual suspects: disk and memory space, resource hogs, background processes, viruses(?), etc. Finally, I happened to notice that the processor was running stepped down, and also the fans seemed to be on a little more than normal. The laptop was running hot!
I broke the laptop down (pictured above), and sure enough, the fans and vents were clogged with lint, most likely from my cat. Cleaned them out, reassembled the laptop, and all is back to normal. BTW, it does take this much work to get at the fans!
It’s interesting that the Chrome browser’s performance seems to be particularly sensitive to slowdowns in processor speed, in this case caused by a laptop that’s running a little hot.
Lesson: My cat makes Chrome run slow!
