If you notice your computer running slowly, particularly on the Internet, you could be the “victim” of a server on the other side of the globe run amok.

In the past year, one of the biggest causes of slowness on computers has been the proliferation of multiple servers serving up the text, graphics, video, audio and ads that make up so many of today’s web pages.

All of those servers consume bandwidth, processor and memory and if you have more than a handful of tabs open that’s a lot of servers churning away to display the elements on those pages.

If you’re busy on the Internet and bouncing from one page to another while keeping previous tabs open to return to, it would not be uncommon to see a dozen or more tabs open on a computer. And yes, I am guilty of this myself as I remote into computers, research problems and catch up on the latest advances in technology.

I have seen users with as many as 40 web pages open in separate tabs at one time. You can bet their computers were crying “Uncle”.

The same goes for program windows like Outlook, Word, Excel or Adobe Reader. I’ve seen users with dozens of these Windows open with the resulting high resource usage bringing their computers to a crawl.

The best way to deal with tab and window creep is to run through the tabs at the top of your browser or the windows in the programs you have open and close the ones you don’t need at that moment.

You can always bookmark those pages if you think you want to return to them later.