Why is our laptop so slow?

[BarbaraofSevillle]

We have what I thought was a half decent laptop and I have been reading for years that pretty much any old laptop is fine for what we use it for, which is nearly always general web surfing, shopping, a bit of Microsoft Office, online banking etc.

Although DP does a very minor bit of video editing, by which I mean that he will take the footage he has made during his various sporting endeavours and pull clips out of it, nothing more.

But it's so so slow and unresponsive, it takes ages to start up and run and open any programmes, and you can click on links etc and nothing happens.

I just use my work laptop most of the time, but that's not a solution for DP, who's preferred option is probably to rush out and spend a grand on something whizzy, but seeing as the one we have should be OK (I think) and we've had an expensive year so we need to be cutting back a bit, I'd really rather stick with what we have for now.

It's an Acer and it's about 2 years old. The specs are

Core i5 5200 2.2 GHz processor
4 GB RAM
x64 processor
Windows 10
167 GB used on hard drive of about 1000 GB

Any ideas? Or am I delusional about it being able to cope with what we use it for?

Not a techie but I went and googled and did some decluttering, also have just downloaded protection that clears out junk etc.

I had exactly the same issue with an acer - it was painfully grindingly slow. As in taking up to a couple of minutes to open anything at all.

It seemed to be set to automatic windows upgrades (even with that disabled) and was forever trying to upgrade itself, going into snooze mode part way through and having to restart the whole process over and over.

PC World had it there more than I had it here, and if anything they made it worse. They had it in their workshop and basically wiped the whole thing and reinstalled the operating system. Still impossibly slow.

I gave up in the end.

Do you have everything connected to OneDrive, and to upload everything to the cloud? This takes a lot of time, and will slow dow your laptop massively.

You can check in the bottom right hand corner where you check for battery remaining etc. There would be a OneDrive symbol and if you right click there it'll give an option to quit OneDrive. You might need to do this every time you start the laptop. Or else disable OneDrive.

Two things jump out at me. 4 gig of RAM is really low by todays standards and you have an old style mechanical hard drive. The 2.2 ghz i5 processor isn't terrible, but it was low end even two years ago.

Your work laptop almost certainly has an SSD (solid state drive), which is at least 10 times faster in reading and writing data. And it likely has a better processor, even if it's just a faster i5.

The good news is that a computer shop can upgrade the RAM to 8 gigabytes and exchange the older hard drive to an SSD and transfer everything over to it. SSD's used to be quite expensive. They're now much, much cheaper. This will be much less expensive than a new laptop but give you a bug boost in speed.

DDs 2 year old Acer was running horribly slow, so much so that DD stopped using it. I took it to a local repair shop for him to have a look and he said that Acers in particular come preloaded with loads of 'stuff' that's not needed. He called it Bloat-ware.

He did a clean and reinstall for £50 and it runs like a dream now.

Windows 10

This. You might get some temporary relief from a declutter, but Windows will just pile it all back on over time. How else do they get to sell new hardware these days ?

DS gave up using his laptop over two years ago, as it was soooooooooo slooooooooooow (he only told me last month). I took it off his hands ripped Windows out put Linux Mint on, and it's faster than the 6 month old Windows 10 machine he bought.

he's not getting it back

I deleted a lot of old Word files and photos - it’s running faster now (8 year old Dell).

Thanks for the replies. I've had a look and Onedrive doesn't appear to be running, but I've found a setting called 'Fresh Start' that seems to reset lots of things without deleting files, photos etc, so we're going to give that a go later and try to install as little as possible.

I didn't know about the different types of hard drive, so that might be something to look into as well as extra RAM.

Work laptop is on Windows 10 Enterprise with a i5 7th gen processor, 7200 2.5 GHz and 8 GB RAM but is a Toshiba and is only about 3 months old.

Do a thorough malware and general integrity check. Windows offers various tools, as do third parties. Google them all carefully first!

If all’s well after that my guess is the culprit is the hard drive, as a PP said. I have a laptop that can run slow (depending on the operation) and it’s definitely caused by the rate that the information can be retrieved from the mechanical drive.

Apart from that I don’t think the specs are poor. They’re fine. For general use 8GB of RAM is a waste. And Windows 10 does not slow down a machine like yours to unuseable speeds, or at all really.

Yes bloat ware and Avers. A bloody nightmare.

The IT team at work replaced my older style mechanical hard drive with an SSD on a laptop I had 3 year ago. Boot time went from 4 minutes to 30 seconds. Everything flew. It was really like getting a new laptop. That part (a 256 gigabyte SSD) now costs about 60 quid.