Question Girlfriend's Laptop is slowwwwww.

[aarono123]

So my girlfriend's Laptop is really slow. It's a HP Notebook 15 and yeah slow. I don't plan on getting an SSD and just focusing on removing stuff and updating. Her laptop takes forever to update so I'm working on that. What catches my attention is her HDD is partitioned into 4 pieces. It's a 1TB HDD and the primary partition is the one that has 980gb available, which is the C: drive. The D: drive is the recovery drive, and it has 18gb total with only 2gb remaining. So 16gb is used up essentially. I'm wondering if I have to do something with her HDD, help?

 

[Obakasama]

Personally I would be checking to see if there's something constantly using the HDD in Task Manager under disk usage for a start. Would also check HDD health using something like CrystalMarkInfo.

I wouldn't be concerned with partitions as they shouldn't affect performance.

 

[aarono123]

Personally I would be checking to see if there's something constantly using the HDD in Task Manager under disk usage for a start. Would also check HDD health using something like CrystalMarkInfo.

I wouldn't be concerned with partitions as they shouldn't affect performance.

There is, it's 100% being used which I know is not great, and its system performance or it can change to her anti virus, and just a bunch of other stuff. It's odd.

 

[Obakasama]

Keep an eye on the behaviours of those processes in Task Manager and see if they settle down after a while. Might be worthwhile using a malware scanner, like MalwareBytes, as well just to double check nothing is in the background.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Disable any unnecessary processes that launch at startup or run in the background. Run some virus/malware scans if you think that might be an issue. The most comprehensive way to do all this would be to do a clean install of Windows, if you want to take the time to do that.

But at the end of the day it's a slow laptop HDD and there's only so much you can do to fix that. I had a similar issue with my GF's laptop, doing a clean install of Windows and physically cleaning/dusting the laptop helped a bit but nothing huge. Eventually upgraded my PC's SSD and put my old one in her laptop, difference is night and day.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Don't forget the amount of installed RAM as not enough of that can affect performance too. Needs to be at least 8GB these days (assuming it's a 64-bit OS of course).