[SOLVED] Is it Win 10 or Dell? Slow start, locks up etc

[mike the car guy]

Hoping someone might be able to help before I break out the lighter fluid and a match.

Dell Inspirion 15, 3000 series, laptop. I3 5015U processor, 2.1G, Win 10 home, 64 bit, 2004 win build, but it's never been good. ~4 years old.

This thing has been a POS since I bought it, but it's gotten worse. Wife claimed it after I went back to my old 2005 1.6 Celeron XP laptop. I've modest PC knowledge, far from expert, but the extended family IT guy. Typing this on an XP machine I built 10 years ago and it's still running ok, although it's showing it's age.

Often, very slow to start and will hang. Often it will get slower and slower, then not work at all. Sometimes just internet, various browsers, it's the machine/OS, not the browser. Typically it means it's updated and wants to install and restart, or it might be it wants to update. Seems daily, but realistically it's at least twice a week, probably 3 times. Update Tuesday? Ha, update daily. Today it locked up on what turned out to be "Preparing security options" I think it was. Push and hold on the start button was the only thing that worked. A couple of times pulling the battery was the only thing that worked. Lightweight use, some local games, not online, some internet, a fraction of what I do with mine. Commonly it will lose WIFI and needs to be disconnected then reconnected to make it work. I've disabled everything I can at startup to try to improve it, but it's still a slug.

I've been dealing with PCs since DOS 3.5. Then Dos 5, Win 3.1, 95, 98, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, 7 and this thing. This is the only one I've hated, and boy do I hate it. But they can't all be like this, can they? Or are they? Would a 10 Pro key off ebay do any good?

Help appreciated.

 

[Colif]

As soon as you took cover off, it would never work again anyway. Dust kills them... although it sounded pretty dead already.

dust is reason they only open hdd in clean rooms. Its why us normal people can't fix them ourselves. Its why they charge lots of money to recover lost data (mainly as it costs money to get equipment although part of price is there to stop everyone wanting to use service). They only have so much time.

 

[mike the car guy]

Oh I know about clean rooms and all that, I wasn't trying to fix it, but I was curious to see if there would be an apparent fault, and little surprised there was. But that's just me, I take things apart that aren't working, sometimes to fix, sometimes just out of curiosity.