So my laptop was really slow for a prety long period of time, apps opening hard, lagging etc. And I was wondering if I reinstall Windows, will it be faster again?
As my specs are i7 3.6GHz, MX150 2GB, 16GB RAM and a 1TB HDD.
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1Depends on your laptop specifications and what programs are installed on it.– user10191234Commented Oct 31, 2020 at 21:28
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This is a very general question in it's present state unless you provide more information.– karelCommented Oct 31, 2020 at 21:29
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1If you run a Repair Install and Keep Data only, that will (a) be simple and (b) keep your User Profile. But you need to reinstall Apps. So do the above, and then install Apps slowly so as to make sure that it continues to run well as you install various Apps. If an App slows it down, uninstall that one for the time being.– anonCommented Oct 31, 2020 at 21:39
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Short answer.. yes. See @John post. I concur.– Señor CMasMasCommented Oct 31, 2020 at 22:45
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1 Answer
A reinstall will likely make things faster, but may not be necessary.
The elephant in the room is your 1TB HDD. Your best bet would be to replace this with an SSD. This will massively increase the speed of your largest bottleneck (even a "slow" SSD is orders of magnitude faster and more reliable then a fast HDD) and get rid of problems cause by the underlying issue - fragmentation.
If replacing your HDD is not an option, you can get a large part of the way to a new system by simply remove programs/files you don't need - especially bloatware and crap installed by OEM vendors) and then defragment the disk.
If you are finding that browsing is going slow, clear your browser caches. (Be aware that this can log you out of any sites you are logged into).
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If it was fast to begin with and now it sucks, putting in an SSD clearly isn't the solution even though it would make his system even faster still. This is nothing but a band-aid. Commented Oct 31, 2020 at 22:44
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@senorcmadmas As per my post I posit that the reason it is slow is due to fragmentation. HDDs suffer from performance degradation while ssd's don't (at least not significantly - they don't need to wait for heads to spin to a particular location)– davidgoCommented Oct 31, 2020 at 23:22
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I see by your score that you are clearly a bright guy @davidgo so no offense but I disagree. "HDDs suffer from performance degradation", no they don't assuming that you defrag your file system ocasionally. On top of that, they can potentially "work forever" when SSDs will always fail eventually. Your suggestion is great but I still think that if his system is now significantly slower than it used to be, there is a cause and the HDD isn't it since Windows 10 will automatically defrag HDDs on a cadence. Still.. GREAT SUGGESTION. Commented Nov 1, 2020 at 17:30