My laptop seems so slow lately. It is really kind of pissing me off. I’m not a computer expert, and so I turn to you, Dopers.
I have a PC, and I’m running Windows 7. Any ideas?
My laptop seems so slow lately. It is really kind of pissing me off. I’m not a computer expert, and so I turn to you, Dopers.
I have a PC, and I’m running Windows 7. Any ideas?
It’s hard to say without more details. That said, there are a few things that would probably help just about anybody.
Check for malware/viruses. Microsoft has a pretty good antivirus these days (Security Essentials), and I would actually recommend it over McAffee or Norton products. Install it and run it, as well as Malwarebytes for good measure. If you’re really hurting for performance, you might want to disable the “live scan” features on your antivirus – it monitors every file that your computer accesses, and can eat up a lot of performance. But if you do that, make sure you schedule regular scans.
Uninstall all unnecessary programs. Just go into “add/remove programs”, and uninstall anything that you recognize as something you don’t use often. Research the programs you don’t recognize, and uninstall any that you don’t find necessary.
Defrag your computer – windows has a decent built in utility. If you haven’t done it in a while, it’ll take a while, so let it run overnight. If you’re running out of hard drive space, clear some out by deleting or moving files.
Upgrading your hardware may help, but shouldn’t be necessary if your computer has worked acceptably in the past.
Possibly the computer’s performance can be reduced by overheating. This triggers the “I’m too hot, slow down” circuits. It’s a good idea to periodically dust out heatsinks, especially on a laptop (if you can open it up easily).
There’s a lot more, and we can use some more specific information. But this is roughly what I do to take care of my parent’s computers whenever I go home.
That’s pretty much all the bases. I’ll also second Security Essentials; I haven’t seen it detect anything yet, but the resource usage is fantastic especially compared to Norton and friends, which are basically a cure worse than the disease.
You can also check the Task Manager (right-click taskbar) and see if there’s anything taking up a lot of CPU or RAM.
Instead of Task Manager, I recommend Process Explorer. Moving the mouse arrow will tell what program is running a particular process. You can find it at Download.com.