system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why do personal computers, smartphones and tablets become slower over time even after cleaning hard drives, but game consoles like the NES and PlayStation 2 still play their games at full speed and show no signs of slowdown?

Why do personal computers, smartphones and tablets become slower over time even after cleaning hard drives, but game consoles like the NES and PlayStation 2 still play their games at full speed and show no signs of slowdown?
gpt
In general, computers *don't* get slower over time.  The difference comes from two main sources:

1. You often install all kinds of stuff on a computer.  The various applications that are running all have to be allocated memory and processor time.  With a console, it's only ever running the current game.  So the longer you've had a computer, the more crap you will have installed on it, and thus the less responsive it becomes.  Reinstalling the OS from scratch will fix this.

2. Newer versions of PC software will be designed to be more powerful.  So every time you upgrade a program to the latest version, it's probably going to use a little more RAM, for instance.  This is done because software developers know that computers are getting more and more powerful, and thus have more and more resources at their disposal.  Contrast that with a console, whose specs are set in stone.

So if you were to wipe your hard drive, reinstall an old version of Windows that existed when you first got the computer (without any of the updates released since then), and installed old versions of all of your software, it would be exactly as fast as when you first got it.