Slow laptop running Windows 7

funkey_monkey

As per the title. I've installed all updates, cleaned the temp files and folders, ran a dick check and a defrag.

The machine has 2x 2Gb ran blocks and a T4500 Pentium dual core processor @2.3GHz.

In task manager it's reporting approx 1500/7995 commit.
Ram total roots as 3998, cached at 600, available at 2700 and free at 2100.

Does this machine need an increase in ram? Apparently it is only over the last 6 months that it has slowed down.

I thought it would only be of the commit LHS value exceeded the team total that an increase in ram would be necessary.


Thanks

CelticRambler

Can't really help with your machine, other to say that I'd considered posting about my Win7 being a lot more sluggish in recent months. I don't allow Windows updates (got fed up with the Microsoft blackmail) but keep most other software up to date. The problem is most noticeable when running Firefox and Thunderbird (it can sometimes take up to 30 seconds to switch between windows) which I've attributed to those programs being progressively "enhanced" to take advantage of faster modern machines That said, I also wonder if my ad-blocking and antivirus programs are clogging up the process too ...

drunkmonkey

Are you running antivirus, maybe get rid of it and use windows defender. Not sure how much ram is going to help, an ssd will give you a big noticeable boost and there gone very cheap.
Can it handle windows 10, might be time to get with the plan.

smuggler.ie

funkey_monkey wrote: »

... ran a dick check and a defrag.

After that there is nothing else left...

Nowso

run a disk clean up

run as admin and clean up system files ie windows updates

failing all reinstall or uograde in the sales

funkey_monkey

drunkmonkey wrote: »

Are you running antivirus, maybe get rid of it and use windows defender. Not sure how much ram is going to help, an ssd will give you a big noticeable boost and there gone very cheap.
Can it handle windows 10, might be time to get with the plan.

It is running Microsoft Security Essentials.

I would like to update it to Windows 10, but I think I'm out of the period to get it for free.
I'm also concerned about driver availability.

funkey_monkey

Nowso wrote: »

run a disk clean up

run as admin and clean up system files ie windows updates

failing all reinstall or uograde in the sales

How do you clean up the System Files? I got into the C: properites and ran clean-up. There was also an option there for System files which I checks. This removed 18Gb of data.
Although the C: is only about 25% populated.

funkey_monkey

CelticRambler wrote: »

Can't really help with your machine, other to say that I'd considered posting about my Win7 being a lot more sluggish in recent months. I don't allow Windows updates (got fed up with the Microsoft blackmail) but keep most other software up to date. The problem is most noticeable when running Firefox and Thunderbird (it can sometimes take up to 30 seconds to switch between windows) which I've attributed to those programs being progressively "enhanced" to take advantage of faster modern machines That said, I also wonder if my ad-blocking and antivirus programs are clogging up the process too ...

Similar complaint from the owner of this one. Just far too slow.
It seems to have livened up a bit.

I wonder if part of the problem is that, like another one I looked it, the user just reads email and shuts down. Meaning that there is a bow-wave of updates, checks and scans to be performed that never get completed.

I told the previous owner to leave their laptop turned on and logged in for as long as possible after use in order to give these a chance to complete. Might also be the case here as there was a lot of updates downloaded.

incentsitive

funkey_monkey wrote: »

I would like to update it to Windows 10, but I think I'm out of the period to get it for free.
I'm also concerned about driver availability.

You can still get it free, you just need to pretend you are disabled.

https://www.howtogeek.com/272201/all-the-ways-you-can-still-get-windows-10-for-free/

CatInABox

When it comes to old computers, there's also a subjective feeling of slowness. People are using phones with solid state storage, way faster than an old HDD, and then swapping over to an ancient laptop. It looks slower because the person is used to a faster phone.

funkey_monkey

There is that, but this was slooooooow.
The few bits and pieces I've done seem to have improved things.

Am I correct in thinking that more RAM will not solve the problem here?

CatInABox

funkey_monkey wrote: »

There is that, but this was slooooooow.
The few bits and pieces I've done seem to have improved things.

Am I correct in thinking that more RAM will not solve the problem here?

It may help.
Replacing the HDD with an SDD will definitely help.
There's also the issue of replacing parts of a computer that may not be worth much now. A new laptop may be the way to go.

smuggler.ie

funkey_monkey wrote: »

There is that, but this was slooooooow.
The few bits and pieces I've done seem to have improved things.

Am I correct in thinking that more RAM will not solve the problem here?

What is slow?
Startup, opening programs, performing tasks(office apps, etc.), browsing?
You dealing with ~8 year old machine. Outdated CPU(Launch Date Q1'10), most likely degraded HDD(launch Resource Monitor - bet you, HDD active time sitting in 100%).


Adding RAM(actually replacing with 2x4GB kit) and moving to SSD will improve things little bit, but CPU will remain bottleneck. See if financially justifiable.

funkey_monkey

I'd like to run perfmon against it to actually log where the problem is.
However, I'm not sure what are the best signals to log.

Does anyone on here know what should be logged to find out the root cause of this problem?


Thanks.

funkey_monkey

Using the Resource Monitor, with general surfing I can see that as stated the disk monitor indicates 95% Highest Active Time and the CPU monitor varies between 60% and 95% Maximum Frequency with memory running at 91% Used Physical Memory.

I've nothing open on the desktop other than Chrome and Resource Monitor. Can this be salvaged by a new SSD with Win7 installed?
Where is the best place to pick up a SSD with windows installed?

Nowso

funkey_monkey wrote: »

Using the Resource Monitor, with general surfing I can see that as stated the disk monitor indicates 95% Highest Active Time and the CPU monitor varies between 60% and 95% Maximum Frequency with memory running at 91% Used Physical Memory.

I've nothing open on the desktop other than Chrome and Resource Monitor. Can this be salvaged by a new SSD with Win7 installed?
Where is the best place to pick up a SSD with windows installed?

time to upgrade

CatInABox

Nowso wrote: »

time to upgrade

Honestly, looking at those figures, your processor isn't able to handle what chrome has become. A new laptop might be in order, more than just an ssd.

funkey_monkey

What would the owner get for this second hand?

Also the spec of this laptop exceeds the requirements for Chrome browser as far as I can see.

Suckit

You could look at other browsers. Vivaldi. Pale Moon.
Other OS's.
Small learning curve switch to Linux. You could look at Linux Mint, Ubuntu or Lubuntu, or any of the many distros recommended for older PCs.

smuggler.ie

Numbers don't look great. Where HDD active time could be written off to downgraded disk and RAM to browser usage, CPU is to high(for the task you describe)

Check startup:How to Disable Startup Programs in Windows - iTunes, Spotify, Dropbox, etc. - disable all unnecessary. Insure no double antivirus applications.


If no improvement, i am afraid is just not up to the task, as suggested above.
As mentioned(post #13) - you can upgrade RAM and disk - will improve a bit, but can't CPU.

funkey_monkey

I've already looked in there. Can anyone see what else can be turned off from the attachments?

Suckit

funkey_monkey wrote: »

I've already looked in there. Can anyone see what else can be turned off from the attachments?

Uninstall CCleaner, it has been useless a long while now, avast aren't improving it.
Also uninstall easybits recovery.
Uninstall AgentMonitor too.
You can disable java auto update.
Personally, I'd remove security essentials too.
Have you ran any malware scans? Something like Malwarebytes.

You could try either of these.
Wisecare365 (promo lifetime licence) or Glary Utilities.

They are both good programs on their own (I wouldn't install them both at the same time) and are on promo sometimes for a year licence. Good for an older PC. Trial should help you anyway.

F-Secure are doing a promo for 1 year (5 devices) but it will require you to use a UK VPN to get the licence key. With a UK VPN on, click 'Try For Free' here.

CatInABox

funkey_monkey wrote: »

Also the spec of this laptop exceeds the requirements for Chrome browser as far as I can see.

The specs for Chrome are just for starting it up, but the internet itself is now more processor intensive than ever. Not sure if you can see it on Win 7, but in the process manager on windows 10, it breaks chrome down by tab. You can see some pages take up massive amounts of memory, takes more processor power to manipulate this then.

smuggler.ie

CatInABox wrote: »

The specs for Chrome are just for starting it up, but the internet itself is now more processor intensive than ever. Not sure if you can see it on Win 7, but in the process manager on windows 10, it breaks chrome down by tab. You can see some pages take up massive amounts of memory, takes more processor power to manipulate this then.

On Win 7 you can see it in Resource Monitor

funkey_monkey

Suckit wrote: »

Uninstall CCleaner, it has been useless a long while now, avast aren't improving it.
Also uninstall easybits recovery.
Uninstall AgentMonitor too.
You can disable java auto update.
Personally, I'd remove security essentials too.
Have you ran any malware scans? Something like Malwarebytes.

You could try either of these.
Wisecare365 (promo lifetime licence) or Glary Utilities.

They are both good programs on their own (I wouldn't install them both at the same time) and are on promo sometimes for a year licence. Good for an older PC. Trial should help you anyway.

F-Secure are doing a promo for 1 year (5 devices) but it will require you to use a UK VPN to get the licence key. With a UK VPN on, click 'Try For Free' here.

Yes, I run malwarebytes. Ccleaner removed almost 20Gb of files.

smuggler.ie

From Resource Manager, can you determine what process(s) is high consuming CPU, RAM, etc. ?

funkey_monkey

Chrome mainly.
I've put Firefox on and told them to run that and see what happens. I'll tweak it when I get my hands on it again.

What I thought was happening was that they were only using it very infrequently for a short period of time and as a result of this there was a bow wave of updates and checks to be executed. When I first got my hands on it, I had a large amount of updates to download.

I told them to leave the machine logged in for a few hours throughout the week and see if that improves the performance, when they get around to using it. I updated the power settings to keep that machine awake when plugged in, so this should allow the updates and checks to proceed.

Suckit

Firefox is the best of the big ones, but is a bit of a hog too.
Have you tried Pale Moon or K-Meleon?
https://www.palemoon.org/
http://kmeleonbrowser.org/

Capt'n Midnight

HD Tune 2.55 - https://www.hdtune.com/download.html

use it to check SMART info on the drive on the off chance the drive is slow because it's on the way out

also do the speed check there shouldn't be too many dips unless the HDD is being over used or there's lots going on in the background.

TomOnBoard

Have you run a chkdsk? If so, and no issues, just re-install a virgin Windows image. If possible do this onto an SSD.

SharpCoder

Windows 7 on a laptop, likely cpu is fine and ram is okay for most tasks, however i'd imagine the gpu is shared and the rendering engines on new browsers slow it down, blink, edgehtml etc. While Blink is fast on modern day processors and desktops, older system would have issues and changing to browsers like vivaldi/maxthon would be useless as they also use blink being chromium forks, as will microsofts up coming Edge (chromium build) replacement for their edge (edgehtml build).

A lot of resource management in windows 7 goes into rendering effects and UI that can bog down the system, if you're okay with losing some visual eye candy you can make windows 7 much faster by disabling many of these like the default Aero theme effects.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-ie/help/15055/windows-7-optimize-windows-better-performance

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/disable-aero-on-windows-vista/

Bleachbit - Clean Temp Files
Auslogics Disk Defrag - Defrag, Run the Optimise option
Msconfig - Disable all unnecessary applications from startup
Display - Classic Mode ( frees up resources)

CelticRambler

CelticRambler wrote: »

That said, I also wonder if my ad-blocking and antivirus programs are clogging up the process too ...

Why not get a Raspberry PI, install Pi-Hole https://pi-hole.net and have that serve as your DNS forwarder on your network.

super_sweeney

Yeah SSD more than likely wont be enough for a machine that old now. It would help but the CPU would very quickly become the bottle neck.

Just as a reference the brother had his laptop about 3 years now and it got awful slow. Specs were still pretty ok Core i5 processor 8gb ram but the HDD was killing it.

So for 80 euro we banged a SSD in it. I cloned the old HDD just so we could get a real gauge of performance by just putting in the SSD. Boot time went from about 7-9 mins to just under 1. Programs became responsive. It still had some issues in my view and i was keen to do a fresh install. But the Brother was happy he got such a performance upgrade from 80 euro vs a huge investment for a new laptop. We still have not done a clean install nearly a month later but he's happy so i ant gonna waste my time on it .

Just thought I'd share

CelticRambler

NoDrama wrote: »

Why not get a Raspberry PI, install Pi-Hole https://pi-hole.net and have that serve as your DNS forwarder on your network.

Sounds like something to put on the "long winter's evening" to-do list!

After Suckit's comment about CCleaner, I disabled that, and things have definitely sped up a bit. I'm still getting a "Firefox (not responding)" message and Thunderbird freezing for 15-30 seconds when switching tabs, so remain convinced that the latest versions of those two programs are just too hungry ... but as the machine (2012 vintage) can still run a dozen other programs at the same time and be more responsive than my phone, it meets my needs!

Regarding the OP's question, I have a different (newer, higher spec) machine that I use for audio/photo/video editing, which has reached the limit of what it can handle with the arrival 4k files. When I priced up extra RAM and a decent-sized SSD, the cost of those two improvements alone almost matched the price of a new laptop with better spec.

H3llR4iser

CelticRambler wrote: »

Regarding the OP's question, I have a different (newer, higher spec) machine that I use for audio/photo/video editing, which has reached the limit of what it can handle with the arrival 4k files. When I priced up extra RAM and a decent-sized SSD, the cost of those two improvements alone almost matched the price of a new laptop with better spec.

Actually the "processing weight" of the content is something most people don't take into account; Even a simple webpage today can easily be a 50MB download as it will "feature" embedded video, animated adverts and rubbish optimization (loading a host of dependencies just to use a couple of functions). That amont of code/video/audio needs to be processed, so the browser rendering engines need to become more complex in order to handle the load.

That said, why some laptops "slow down" so dramatically over time remains a bit of a mystery in certain cases - I've had laptops brought to me by friends or family members for a "clean up", which would be impossibly slow even just after a fresh Windows reinstall - so much so that I suspected hardware faults (mostly hdd or Ram), yet the diagnostics reported nothing out of order.

On the other hand, I still have a Core 2 Duo P8400, 10-years-old HP Pavilion that's perfectly usable - and until you try something graphically intensive, you wouldn't notice it's such an old PC.

nigwerwig

I'd put windows 10 on it from the link in one of the posts and see how it's goes. Iv done it a few times and it made a big difference. There is lots of YouTube videos shows tips on how to make it faster do a few of them and you will see I little bit more.

Then if it's still not up to it sell it and the new owner will have the newist windows off set the price of a new laptop

H3llR4iser

Forgot to add this - it might be very obvious, but...did you check the cooling vents aren't clogged with dust / particles / assorted sh1t? A thermal throttling laptop can be painfully slow...

funkey_monkey

I did, but I'm tempted to get a pistol blower and give it another go. There is no visible dust around the vents, so I presume all is good.

H3llR4iser

funkey_monkey wrote: »

I did, but I'm tempted to get a pistol blower and give it another go. There is no visible dust around the vents, so I presume all is good.

Well, you have an integrated blower...try blowing a bit in the vents and see if a puff of dust comes out the other side (and before anyone goes "sure you'll kill the PC with the dampness of your breath - no, you won't).

CelticRambler

H3llR4iser wrote: »

Actually the "processing weight" of the content is something most people don't take into account; Even a simple webpage today can easily be a 50MB download as it will "feature" embedded video, animated adverts and rubbish optimization (loading a host of dependencies just to use a couple of functions). That amont of code/video/audio needs to be processed, so the browser rendering engines need to become more complex in order to handle the load.

I accept that ... to a certain extent. :cool: Then I hear people getting agitated about having (or not having) super-fast broadband, and can't help but wonder what other junk will be shoveled down the fibre-optics and keep actual page-load speeds at 56k modem levels! :pac:

funkey_monkey

I have installed Windows 10. Seems a bit quicker. Are there any hints on how to further improve the responsiveness of this OS?

I've got BlueMoon installed as well. Remvved the apps previously mentioned and steps mentioned in post #32.

I'll read online later about ways to improve it, but thought I'd ask here too.

nigwerwig

funkey_monkey wrote: »

I have installed Windows 10. Seems a bit quicker. Are there any hints on how to further improve the responsiveness of this OS?

I've got BlueMoon installed as well. Remvved the apps previously mentioned and steps mentioned in post #32.

I'll read online later about ways to improve it, but thought I'd ask here too.

YouTube how to make window 10 faster and try a few of the videos

TomOnBoard

funkey_monkey wrote: »

I have installed Windows 10. Seems a bit quicker. Are there any hints on how to further improve the responsiveness of this OS?

I've got BlueMoon installed as well. Remvved the apps previously mentioned and steps mentioned in post #32.

I'll read online later about ways to improve it, but thought I'd ask here too.

Did you run a chkdsk on the drive? If so, and there are no issues, then you've probably achieved as much performance improvement as you can, other than at the margin, assuming that you did a clean Win10 install and not an upgrade.

After that, migration to an SSD is next on your list, followed by additional RAM, coupled with the creation of a RAMDISK to hold all temp & cache files. After that, a new machine( and stay the hell away from crap Celeron procs and the like...)

Capt'n Midnight

You can remove some of the startup crud

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-uninstall-remove-restore-built-apps-windows-10