Slow laptop running Windows 7

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 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.

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 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).

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...)