My laptop is too slow. I've tried everything

Anonymoys

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Aug 29, 2013
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Hello,my name is John!
Recently my laptop suddenly became very slow and I've tried everything. The appearance is awful in order to make it faster and I've disabled everything. My antivirus doesn't find any virus(AVG) and I've installed ccleaner,and clean it every day with no result. I also make defragments weekly. Ι start to believe that its too slow because i have windows ultimate,an a not so fast laptop! Any suggestions ?
 
Solution
I strongly agree with himnextdoor. When a browser like Chrome or Firefox is open, it will take up a lot of Memory as you will see in your Task Manager. If you added toolbars and other stuff that you installed in your browser, it will take up more and more of your laptop's Memory. While the browser is open, expect other applications like Office or Adobe to be very slow because the browser and the toolbars are already taking up a huge chunk of Memory. A quick solution is to uninstall, disable or remove the toolbars or add-ons that are unnecessary to make your laptop perform faster.

I also like the link himnextdoor provided (the How to Reduce Number of Programs that Run at Startup). The action steps are very easy to follow. If you still...

Deus Gladiorum

Distinguished


Hey John, I'll need a little more information. What model is the laptop? Additionally, how old is it? And lastly, does your laptop feel particularly hot to the touch, at or somewhat near the point where it seems like it'd burn your hand?
 
Anonymoys John,

A friend of mine complained of the same laptop laziness you mention, and from her description, the slowing was gradual but she became fed up quickly.

This laptop- an 18-month old 1.8GHz with Windows 7 Home Premium, had scheduled defrag, antivirus, and I added Malwarebytes anti-malware and found nothing. My prime suspect was that there were multivarious registry errors, but even that figure was not serious. This system had only 600-something errors- the lowest I'd ever seen! I believe those free registry checking programs just generate random numbers over 2,500 and promise to fix the first 800 to scare users into buying the full program. Another friend paid $40 for one of these magic registry elixirs to fix the 2,739 errors which it did too quickly to be believed, and the performance was not altered one bit. ther may well be useful application of this kind, I just haven't heard any personal accoutts of them. Rant complete. I did however notice MyStart Incredimail, which, like it's evil cousin Incredibar search engine redirector, acts in a way I and apparently many others think of as malware. What I did find was that in Task Manager, there were 67 processes running and sapping the GPU time and RAM. I turned everything off that could be turned off, removed unused programs- though on orders- not the suspicious Incredimail as my friend liked it and she didn't feel like setting up new email accounts and sending out hundreds of email change of address notices. A noticeable feature were that there were 3.6GB of temp files and 1.2GB in the recycling bin. A simple change though may have made the most difference, to change the Windows 7 theme from Aero to Basic and disable transparency. I use a Dell Precision T5400 dual quad core Xeon and when I changed graphics card , I used the Aero theme and the system seemed sluggish. Using Passmark Performance Test, with Aero, the system had a rating of 1939. Changing to Basic theme and no transparency alone changed the rating to 2315!

When all this was done, the turning off and cleaning, I was unsure how much had been accomplished, but I was informed the laptop was back to form. I'm not 100% certain, but tend to believe that the Aero to Basic theme change was probably responsible for most of the improvement.

Sorry, for a kind of generic ramble, but the cure seemed to be a kind of generic ramble of seemingly tiny adjustments that appeared to add up. My suggestion for your limping laptop is to install and run Passmark Performance Test- there's a 30-day free trial, and then compare the test results from you laptop to other tests of the same model. If the test results are not too seriously off, you might try the tasks mentioned, Malwarebytes, registry error check (maintaining a healthy skepticism), turning off Aero if if's running, all the auto-fuss and background programs- tasks, backup, etc., and clean out and unused programs, temp files, and obsolete data files. If the performance is severely off the others' marks, it may be time to wipe the hard drive and reinstall everything, or if some parameter is really off- RAM, disk, memory, 2D, 3D, then you might look into relevant hardware issues and run memtest, try a different video card if you have one or inboard graphics.

Someday, computers will be both useful and fun! Let us know how you get on.

Cheers,

BambiBoom

 
Anonymoys John,

Without knowing the Toshiba model number and therefore the CPU speed and so forth, I can't compare other results to your laptop, but I believe that Windows 7 Ultimate will not be at all happy on 1GB of RAM- it will just only run Windows and have nothing left for applications. I use Windows 7 Ultimate using 16GB RAM and the system I just bought with Win 7 Professional has 24GB. I would suggest adding at least 3GB of RAM and try again.

Cheers,

BambiBoom
 

pchelper652

Honorable
Oct 30, 2013
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10,520
You might want to try the following to troubleshoot to if it is a hardware problem or software problem.

Checking your Hardware
Yes, Physically cleaning your computer can help reduce the heat build up. If it is a laptop you can buy a fan to place under your laptop to cool it down. Check to see in your task monitor if you are using alot of RAM or cpu cycles. If you are using up a large percentage of your RAM you probably need upgrade to more RAM or use less programs at the same time. If you CPU is continously spiking, it could be your computer is overheating or you have a program that using it. You can try to find and kill it using your task monitor.

Cleaning Up Your OS
1) run chdsk on your harddrive to see if you have any bad sectors
2) try degfraging your harddrive
4) if using a lot of ram try uninstalling some of your unused software
You can try some software fix some of these problem if you dont want to do it manually.
Checkout http://solvingpcproblems.com
 

himnextdoor

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Oct 26, 2013
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RegieOK

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Nov 11, 2013
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I strongly agree with himnextdoor. When a browser like Chrome or Firefox is open, it will take up a lot of Memory as you will see in your Task Manager. If you added toolbars and other stuff that you installed in your browser, it will take up more and more of your laptop's Memory. While the browser is open, expect other applications like Office or Adobe to be very slow because the browser and the toolbars are already taking up a huge chunk of Memory. A quick solution is to uninstall, disable or remove the toolbars or add-ons that are unnecessary to make your laptop perform faster.

I also like the link himnextdoor provided (the How to Reduce Number of Programs that Run at Startup). The action steps are very easy to follow. If you still have difficulty following, you can just enter the action steps into YouTube and watch some videos and follow the instructions. This way, you will be sure of what to do by reading the instructions and watching videos.

Thing here is to search for free solutions first and that you can do without installing anything before you go for additional software or upgrades. If that works, you can save a lot of money. If you still need help, you can go to http://www.registryproblemsolver.com/. In many cases though, the guide at http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/faq/id-1860438/reduce-number-programs-run-start-simple-steps.html could be already enough to make your laptop run faster. You should try them first before installing anything (whether paid or free versions).
 
Solution

himnextdoor

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Oct 26, 2013
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Thank you. :)