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My laptop is performing very low compared to when I just purchased it from the store. Normally when I try to clean it, the most common things are ad-/spamware and just a bunch of cluttered and scattered files and programs across the system. The harddrive hasn't been defragmented either in those 2 years.

So this is what I did.

  1. Cleaned out and uninstalled any unwanted software from the system. I mostly used this laptop for browsing the net and the occasional paper writing in Word. So I didn't really need to delete much
  2. Cleaned out browser history and build op sh** with CCleaner
  3. Disabled any unwanted service and/or startup program I didn't want at boot time.
  4. Defragged the entire drive using the most complex defrag script in MyDefrag

Now these are the basic things I do when I want to gain my old speed of my system back. Yet I rebooted the laptop 3x and the average boot time was between 3 minutes and 3 minutes and a half (edit: booting in safe modus minimal took about 55 seconds). Still very slow comparing to the of the shelf time. Starting Word took me a good solid minute as well. This seemed very strange, so the only thing I thought could be the problem was a faulty harddrive.

So I did some more in-depth tests:

  1. Booted up UltimateBootCD from a usb drive and ran the entire HDAT2 test, which took me 4.5 days to complete. Every block, sector and I believe bit of the drive had been tested, and not a single fault or error was found.
  2. Ran all the tests from HD Tune Pro and compared them to the average performed userbenchmark out there.
  3. Ran the UserBenchmark tool and compared them as well to the average.

Now I don't know much about the read-/write speeds and acces times of a hard drive so I'll include all the analysis data in the links below.

I'm confused about all of this, there are no errors or any really significant problems with my HDD and still my Windows is slow. Am I looking in the wrong direction and might the problem be of another cause? Maybe memory related?

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  • If you boot into a minimal boot configuration, and only load the drivers that are required for your system to function, does that help the boot times. Have you performed a benchmark on what programs are causing the system to perform poorly? I have had the same installation of Windows, for over a decade, which has been upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1, which was upgrade to Windows 10 and that same installation was moved to another PC at some point. So its perfectly possible to have the same installation for more then 2 years.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Aug 13, 2016 at 11:23
  • How do I run a benchmark on a single program? I've had good experience with other laptops as well that only started to show issues after 4-5 years. And I switched them over to Linux or installed an SSD in them. This laptop however performs poorly and has been decreasing in performance relatively fast. I don't see the use in booting it up in minimal requirements as this does not emulate a normal situation in which I would use the laptop, however I will try it and post the results.
    – Edito
    Commented Aug 13, 2016 at 11:37
  • "performs poorly" isn't descriptive enough. I asked for some very basic information, I expect you to research how you benchmark the system, to things like device driver memory leaks.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Aug 13, 2016 at 11:43
  • An easy fix for the problem, in almost all situations, is to reinstall windows. Since you have windows 8.1 an easy way to do that is outlined in this Microsoft help center article.
    – TheKB
    Commented Aug 13, 2016 at 12:34
  • I agree above. Backup your personal data and reinstall. Clean as a whistle. Crap gets cluttered up after years, it's how it gets. Let's face it, no matter how much we love tech, it's not nearly near perfect.
    – ejbytes
    Commented Aug 13, 2016 at 12:40

1 Answer 1

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You have finite resources. When one or more of these are used up the applications needing them will have to wait and this is experienced as a slow computer.

Most times this is caused by either CPU, Memory, or Disk.

To find which resource is over-utilized, and what is doing it, use the Windows Resource Monitor which since introduced in Windows 7 has made it VERY easy to troubleshoot performance issues in Windows.

As to how to use it, here are some google results to get you going...

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=windows+8.1+performance+monitor

BTW fragmentation is rarely a problem nowadays since the drives are so large. It only becomes a problem if you fill up the disk and there is no large continuous free space to save the data. If you are working with large files and your disk is nearly full then perhaps this is a problem, but most likely not.

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