Windows 7 is extremely slow

[unplanned bacon]

This is on my old laptop. It was my first computer at university. It takes a good couple of minutes to start. RAM is pretty much always full, hard disk light is always lit, asking it to do something (anything) can take a good few minutes before it actually does it or just throws out some random error. Tried a USB keyboard in it and it just kept cycling between connected and disconnected state. The same keyboard was working fine on my MacBook less than a minute after being plugged in (except the p key, but that's the keyboard's fault. This keyboard isn't mine).

Can I get the Windows 7 machine to actually do something? 3GB RAM, i5 2410M

EDIT: It could be the HDD, because the computer sounds like an engine, and I'd always assumed it was the fans. The SMART status is good for the HDD

 

[ShadowsVoid]

If your RAM is always full then you probably have a lot of programs running in the background. Go to the control panel and uninstall the ones you do not use.
Then press the windows start button, type system configuration, go to the startup tab, untick all the programs you do not use. This will stop programs from loading up when you boot your PC. This should make things faster

 

[coreydwillis]

On the software front, like ShadowsVoid says, you should uninstall programs you're not using and check which programs startup with Windows. Next I would install an antimalware solution such as Malwarebytes (great program) to clear off any memory hogging malware.

On the hardware side, I would recommend installing either 4GB or 8GB of RAM depending on what your motherboard supports. You will need to reinstall with Windows 7 x64 to use the full memory though. You could also use this time to do a fresh install with your free copy of Windows 10. You should also consider installing an SSD. This will greatly decrease bootup times. It's about $99 for a 256GB SSD it's not a huge investment as long as you don't need a ton of storage.

 

[unplanned bacon]

On the software front, like ShadowsVoid says, you should uninstall programs you're not using and check which programs startup with Windows. Next I would install an antimalware solution such as Malwarebytes (great program) to clear off any memory hogging malware.

On the hardware side, I would recommend installing either 4GB or 8GB of RAM depending on what your motherboard supports. You will need to reinstall with Windows 7 x64 to use the full memory though. You could also use this time to do a fresh install with your free copy of Windows 10. You should also consider installing an SSD. This will greatly decrease bootup times. It's about $99 for a 256GB SSD it's not a huge investment as long as you don't need a ton of storage.

I considered hardware upgrades last year, before getting my MacBook, but opted against it (I'd considered more RAM and an SSD), as it cost half the price of the machine when it was new to do, plus I'd need a new battery and that doesn't fix some of the ghosting keys. The computer's not dead, and I do come back to retrieve stuff from it, so I was just wondering how to get it to go quicker. Also the grub menu from the days this also had Ubuntu (not a true dual boot) still pops up on boot. Any way to get rid of that.

If this had nothing I needed, I wouldn't even bother