Computers & Electronics

Please help - laptop is very slow

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  • Jan 4th, 2020 9:15 am
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Oct 9, 2006
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GTA
Another thought: your HD could be dying. Make sure you back up ASAP.

As other others said clean install + ssd should fix things.

Btw, how much free space do you have? A nearly full drive can slow things down to.
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Nov 25, 2014
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I have a 6 years old laptop, i5 8gb 1Tb hhd. Boot up was very slow, I use it mainly for web browsing, youtube and Microsoft office. Speed in opening app or file is fine and I run a cleaner every month. But I replaced it with 1TB SSD that I got on BF from staples with $25 off coupon. I did a clean install of Windows 10, used the license of Win 7 and now it's faster, good as new
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rabbit wrote: Now, I'm not saying that getting an SSD is a bad idea, but all it would do is mask the current problems you're having. The real issue is that your system is most likely full of crap. My main system is a Core2Duo, and even when Windows + software was installed on a 7200RPM HDD, it wouldn't take a minute to open up an Excel file.\ .
THANK YOU

While I'm also not opposed to an SSD, most people think hard drives may as well be like sending a fax to communicate.
I don't argue that they're slower, but they're not as slow as some people imply them to be.

I run hard drives everywhere and they're fine.
My SSD based systems (especially RAID0 NVMe) are obviously much faster, but it's not like the hard drive based systems (even on ancient hardware like Core2) don't take a minute to do most things.
I recommend a clean install of Windows
This is my first go to. If it's still slow to you, then start doing expensive things like spending money on SSDs.
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When the cheapass people at RFD tell you to buy something almost unanimously...It's probably a good idea. Even if you stuck with your HDD and did a clean install, there's no guarantee it won't bloat up again and we end up with the same problem. Every time I get a new computer, I'll swap out the HDD with an SSD, sometimes the SSD can be up to 10-20x faster in certain read/write operations. SSD prices have crashed the past few years so they're not too expensive. I haven't had to deal with a slow computer since I've switched to SSDs as primary drives. I only use HDD for external storage now.

8 GB ram a little low nowadays but it's workable. I normally find myself needing 16 GB. But this only affects having multiple things open at the same time - especially browser tabs.

PS I shitlisted ACER, I've seen too many breakdowns, including a netbook I owned that lasted just a few days beyond its 1-year warranty.
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Sorcerer wrote: Also go with a clean install if you can bear the hassle. Something might have gotten f---d up and a fresh install can really help.
With the huge windows 10 rollouts happening once/twice a year, it is practically like a fresh install less removal of user installed apps. Just for convenience, I have never done fresh installs when swapping HDD for SSD. It has always worked and never any crashing afterwards.
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Jul 26, 2004
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After upgrading a few office machines to SSD last month, i'd say clean install is way faster than cloning. Windows 10 is pretty good with getting the right drivers, didn't have to hunt for any drivers at all. and with UEFI bios, the windows key is integrated on that, no need to fish for windows key either.

Where as cloning takes hours with a USB enclosure, takes a little less if you hook both drives up to another computer to clone internally. Worse is after cloning for hours and it didn't work due to some weird OEM partition order that you didn't get correctly.
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I'm running a pair of older Aspires (AMD A6 and Intel i5-3230 from 2011-12 respectively) both with 8GB RAM.

I'd say that it is abnormal even with the OEM drive (both of mine came with 750GB drives). I'd check taskman to see what else is running (I find the Win security utilising a lot of drive first 10-15 minutes after boot up).

That said, an SSD is faster, or even a SSHD. With the AMD Aspire (no UEFI), and using cloned drives, power on to log in screen took 40 secs with the OEM drive, 20 sec with the 1TB Seagate SSHD (SSDs were expensive back in '12-'13 and I needed the SSHD capacity for photo storage), and 6 seconds with the Samsung 850.

I just replaced (via indirect cloning) the Seagate SSHD in the Intel Aspire with an Adata SU800 and it runs a lot faster (Civ 5 loads up in 1/3- 1/2 the normal time)
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Aug 2, 2004
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East Gwillimbury
Has anyone considered that the hard drive is dying?

I can’t see a hard drive being that slow unless it is beginning to fail.
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Hobotrader wrote: When the cheapass people at RFD tell you to buy something almost unanimously...It's probably a good idea.
It should noted that RFD has a lot of hearsay experts.
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thriftshopper wrote: ......I'd say that it is abnormal even with the OEM drive (both of mine came with 750GB drives). I'd check taskman to see what else is running (I find the Win security utilising a lot of drive first 10-15 minutes after boot up).
.....

The infamous one is windows update. Sometime it keeps trying to install a new driver, fails, then repeats trying again. The loop continues infinitely taking up like 85%+ of the cpu and there’s no way to tell w10 to skip that update
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Nov 22, 2015
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a_souljah wrote: Appreciate all the help. I'll grab a starter SSD - saw this:
https://www.staples.ca/products/2858952 ... e500bam-st

Figured I would use the 25$ staples coupon to bring down the price a bit.
Again, appreciate all the input
Don't you need a M.2 drive so it'll fit inside your laptop..?

Or do you plan on getting an SSD enclosure so it can sit on your desk?
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Dec 23, 2003
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will888 wrote: OP, just do a youtube search for a video on how to do a drive replacement based on your model number. You probably won't get the exact number, but close enough is good enough. It should take no more than half hour generally. Get a SSD, clone the hard drive and do the swap.
Don't clone the drive. Install the OS and apps from scratch. This will be a good time to revisit apps that you really need vs were installed. You can put the old drive on an external enclosure. Just make sure you download the drivers for the items you have installed.
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superfresh89 wrote:
Don't you need a M.2 drive so it'll fit inside your laptop..?

Or do you plan on getting an SSD enclosure so it can sit on your desk?
Most laptops in the past 20 years use a slim factor (<11-13mm thckness) 2.5" drive so virtually any SSD will work. There may be some clunkers from the '80s that use 3.5" drives but I've never opened up one of those.
l69norm wrote: The infamous one is windows update. Sometime it keeps trying to install a new driver, fails, then repeats trying again. The loop continues infinitely taking up like 85%+ of the cpu and there’s no way to tell w10 to skip that update
Remarkably, none of my 2 laptops have done that. Granted, one has always had an SSD with Win 10 and the other the SSHD. The AMD Aspire did have a MB fry (I think Win 10 fried the BIOS - boot loop with nothing attached to the computer) when I tried to DG from Win 10 Preview back to Win 7. IIRC that also killed the 750GB HDD.
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thriftshopper wrote: Most laptops in the past 20 years use a slim factor (<11-13mm thckness) 2.5" drive so virtually any SSD will work. There may be some clunkers from the '80s that use 3.5" drives but I've never opened up one of those.



Remarkably, none of my 2 laptops have done that. Granted, one has always had an SSD with Win 10 and the other the SSHD. The AMD Aspire did have a MB fry (I think Win 10 fried the BIOS - boot loop with nothing attached to the computer) when I tried to DG from Win 10 Preview back to Win 7. IIRC that also killed the 750GB HDD.
Oh. I guess the two laptops that I've done SSD swaps for are ultrabooks that already had an M.2 SSD inside
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I've got old, cheap creaky technology. None of the current 3 laptops we have have M.2 slots. I had, until it died, a tiny Fujitsu that had a 1.8" drive. That thing was miserably slow as it also only had 1 GB of RAM (soldered, not expandable).
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The dude should check if there's an m.2 slot available. It's nice to have SSD + HDD in a computer.
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I've disassembled my Acer Aspires to clean the CPU fan and heat sink (pretty much requires full disasembly). Definitely nothing resembling a M2 slot. I don't think low-priced laptops of the early teens had them. Wish they did.
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He said his computer has an i5 7000u or something like that, which is Kaby Lake. Meaning the laptop is only a three or four years old tops. That said, there's no reason to recommend an M.2 drive when OP already got a 500GB 860 EVO (I think?). I'm typing this from a Thinkpad with the exact same CPU, and it has an M.2 slow (my previous Skylake T460s had no SATA slot at all... only M.2) That said, there's a big difference between a Thinkpad T-series and an Acer Aspire.

This PC is fast as lightning for everyday tasks with an i5 7200u (or something like that) and an 860 EVO or an Adata SX8200 (had one of those in it before but then I broke the cable on the SATA-M.2 adapter, which cost almost as much as the 860 EVO (or is it 870 EVO... not that it matters much) has on sale at Staples on and off for the past couple months. So I downgraded to SATA, and I honestly don't notice much difference.

OP's problems will almost certainly be solved with a clean non-OEM Windows install (i.e. install it from the regular MS Media Creation tool, not from any kind of Acer restore disk). That cheapo computer likely came with one of those 5400RPM 1TB drives that are ubiquitous in BestBuy and Walmart-grade laptops.

SSDs make a massive difference. Anybody who says different has had their head in the sand for the past decade. I got my first SSD in 2010 or 2011 when 60GB cost over $200. Since then I've hated every moment I've had to do most anything on a machine without an SSD. Sure it runs OK for basic tasks once Windows has had time to load things into RAM. But when you have to install Windows updates or do anything disk intensive, you might as well go out for the afternoon with an HDD-based computer, no matter how many 5GHz cores it has and 64GB RAM of 3600MHz DDR4 memory.

Long term storage was the bottleneck in computers for years. SSDs finally solved that problem, allowing the storage subsystem at last to keep up with the very quick CPUs, memory, and graphics cards that we've enjoyed for years. Recommending this poor guy to stick with his crap OEM 5400RPM HDD and do a clean Windows install are doing him a disservice when a 1TB SSD can be bought for around $100 on sale these days.

Apple figured all this out and started replacing their HDD-based laptops with fast SSDs while PC OEMs continued their race to the bottom with cheaper and cheaper large capacity hard drives to attract uninformed consumers who shopped on "specs" (Oooh, look Honey, this one has 2 Tee Bees of "memory" and it's only $599!). So Mac users got used to fast storage and instantaneous responsiveness. Then they go to do something on a Windows PC with a crappy, slow hard drive and it's sluggish and crunchy, further convincing them of the superiority of the Apple platform and increasing the brand's prestige (and people's willingness to spend $2000 on a machine for light MS Word, Facebook, etc.)

/rant

OP, enjoy your SSD. Get that hard drive out of there and never look back. Your problems will be a thing of the past.
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Back to the topic of SSDs, I remember back in the mid '80s when there were SS memory expansion cards (I think it was some form of SS called "bubble memory" back then). <1MB would have cost thousands. Never saw one in action to see what it did (I forget) and how fast.
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