[SOLVED] what causes a significant slow down over time.?

[paul calhoun]

About a year ago I upgraded my Toshiba P75 a7200- i7 by adding 8g more ram (16total) and changing to a SSD. It was so fast loved it. About 3 months ago I noticed changes in the boot and loading. I updated every drive and optimized. Noting helped and it just kept getting slower. 2 weeks ago it took over 15min to boot and every new program opened took forever to load. I changed out all the Ram thinking maybe there was a bad stick. I changed the SSD back to the original optic thinking may be the drive was bad. No effect it is just about unusable now. Even solitare takes over a min to load. It posted this to CPU section but got no advice. Any ideas? Thanks

 

[Darkbreeze]

Adding installed programs that these days, practically all want to have some kind of process that resides in memory.

Viruses, malware, trojans and other infections.

Running out of drive space on the drive the OS is installed on. This can be for many reasons but a few common ones are accumulation of temporary files, Windows.old folders from major Windows spring and fall updates or excessive personal and downloaded files and folders that are bringing your total on the drive near it's capacity and should be moved off to a secondary or external drive. (And then backed up to another location so they are not lost if that drive should happen to fail)

Leaving System restore enabled. (Which is lame, because it never works right when you try to use it for recovery anyhow. You are much better off taking snapshots manually using a third party program like Macrium reflect or Acronis True Image, and not allowing them to run except at a time of your choosing. I tend to make a backup periodically but I disable System restore immediately following a clean install OR performing one of the major Windows spring and fall updates that generally turns it back on.)

There are some things here that you can try, that should probably be done as a regular maintenance routine anyhow.

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In addition, if you do not have an anti-virus/malware scanner, I would either get one or make sure that Windows defender has fully up to date virus definitions (DO this as well, if you have a 3rd party virus and malware utility) and then run full scans of all connected drives. If nothing turns up, it might be a good idea to run a "second opinion" scanner as well. You can find some general guidelines on this here:

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[Flayed]

You could boot it into safe mode and see if it is the same to rule out driver/windows issue.

 

[Darkbreeze]

I would also probably recommend that you run some drive testing utilities to see if perhaps the drive is going bad.