Compaq presario laptop really slow presumably after windows update

[Kasures]

Hi
my Compaq Presario CQ57 has bean working fine for 3 years now i play games like tf2 dota 2 and a few online browser games in the past witch all ran on my laptop without a problem but recently i turned my laptop off before shutting down it downloaded a windows update then when i came back to my laptop in the morning it took ruffly 30 minutes to boot up then it took 10 minutes to start Chrome before giving me a error i have used anti malware and put some new thermal paste on the processor cleaned all the dust from inside but it is still the same

 

[MarkW]

Sounds like you might have some bad sectors on the hard drive. Go to My Computer and open that, and right click on the hard drive, and select Properties. A panel will open, and select the Tools tab. On that tools page, click the Check Disk button, and let that run. It will tell you if you have bad sectors. If you have more than 20 bad sectors, I would get as much stuff on that drive moved elsewhere ASAP. If you have less than 20 bad sectors, login as administrator and run the Check Disk tool again, and it will attempt to replace the bad sectors with spare sectors.

However, even if it says it fixed all known bad sectors, that drive is probably in the process of dying. So I would not trust it for long if it has bad sectors.

If that is the case, look into buying an SSD to replace the hard drive with, as it will really make your laptop fast and snappy again. They cost a bit more than hard drives, but its the one thing you can do for a laptop to make it run better than new.

 

[Kasures]

i think i have followed the steps above correctly i clicked on computer right clicked on the hard disk drive clicked properties then tools then under the sentence Error-Checking i clicked check now i waited about 15 minutes i got a message saying

no problems were found on the device or disk it is ready to use

Edit it also says 0 bad files found

 

[MarkW]

Well, thats good news in that your hard drive is not developing bad sectors.

When was the last time you ran Defrag?

 

[Kasures]

I have never herd of Defrag before

 

[MarkW]

OK. I think we found your problem...

As your computer saves things, it uses spaces we call sectors on the hard drive. Eventually, we delete some files, and then something else eventually comes and fills in the now empty spaces left by deleting those old files. Over time, files become fragmented, which means that while the entire file is stored on the hard drive, fragments of it are all over the place, and it takes the hard drive longer to retrieve all the pieces when you need that file loaded.

In order to reduce the amount of fragmentation, we run Defrag every so often. It really depends on how much writing and deleting of files you do over a period of time. If you spend a lot of time per day working on things that write and delete files a lot, you might want to defrag once every week or two. If on the other hand, you spend most of your time browsing the web, and occasionally downloading something, then once every month or two should be enough.

Earlier I had you go to the Tools tab, and run Check Disk. Go back to that same page, but instead of running Check Disk, look at the second button on that panel, and it should say Defrag. Run that. It will take a little while. After its done, restart your system and see if its faster than it has been.

 

[Kasures]

Ok im de fragmenting my files now but i was thinking if this was the problem would it not slow down over time? this we a very sudden thing one night it was working fine the next morning really really slow to connect to the internet open chrome games ect do you think it may have something to do with the windows update witch happened the night before it slowed down? Anyway i'll see how it goes after the defrag

 

[MarkW]

Yes, but lets try to eliminate as many things as we can. Hopefully by doing that, it will lead us to what remains, which should be the problem... Much like Sherlock Holmes did...

 

[Kasures]

Seams like a good idea the de fragmentation is 23% Done it should Hopefully be finished shortly.

 

[Kasures]

it Now says pass 59: 0% consolidated not quite sure what that means 😵