Need help with slow laptop

What do you mean, when you say an "older laptop"? That doesn't tell us much or give us much to go on. Eh?

I have several old laptops, from different makers, that now run Windows Ultimate/32 and all work great.
One is an older Toshiba, that originally came out with Windows XP on it, but now with 2gb of ram, and a 120 GB SSD, and a new battery, it's running great, and I use it almost every day.

But because of the natural tendency of a laptop to run slower than a desktop, to conserve power and generate less heat, they do require some great tweaking and tuning to get the best performance out of them.

Of course, keeping the HD clean of junk, is important, but there's a lot more to getting the very best performance out of any laptop. Adding an SSD will really ramp up the performance of any laptop.

When you're using a small and slow HD, a huge jump in performance can be had by telling Windows to move its Kernel off of the HD and into ram memory on boot-up, where it can run MUCH faster. I do that on every computer I set up or tune up. You can find that registry tweak, by doing a Google search.

It's amazing to me, how many things like the above mentioned tweak, that are already built into the Windows Registry by the programmers at Microsoft. I call those things "Safe Defaults", that do nothing but slow down the operation of Windows. I applaud the guys who have taken the time and made the effort to find those Defaults and post their 'fixes' to the internet.

Good Luck!
TechnoMage

FDM said:

I would appreciate any suggestions on any additional steps I might undertake to resolve this slow response issue.

Run a diagnostic on the HD(I assume it is a spinner.) If it is on the way out it is common that the OS retries the operation when trying to read or write data. The necessity to perform the operations multiple times could be what is slowing the system down.

Also I would back up your data while the HD is still working.

If the diagnostic says the drive is good then you can go from there. But old drive suddenly slow is often an indicator of immanent drive failure. Do the backup first just in case.

Windows 7 is nearing the end of its supported life and MS is grudgingly still providing updates, but....
I've already seen Win-7 updates totally disable Win-7.
So my best advise (only a suggestion) is to just disable Windows Updates, unless, you have the capability to do a complete C: drive backup or clone, before accepting any more MS updates.

Just last week, I had a customer who got an MS Update and then his PC would no longer boot up.
Some critical system files were either deleted or corrupted and no attempt at a repair would work.
So the only fix possible was to Restore a year old backup. That's never good, to have to use a backup that is a year old. That's why I do my own backups on a weekly (not weakly) basis.

Once I got that man's PC back up and running normally, and all his software up to date, I made for him another Backup Image file, using my old favorite Backup program, "Ghost 11.5".

Hi,
Click Start and type in the search box
resource monitor
Hit the enter key or click on the suggestion
You should land on the Overview page post a screen shot so we might see what is going on


Most common cause lately has been svchost.exe acting up so if you see that on the top of the cpu list see if these windows updates are installed KB3020369 & KB3172605
If not manually install them.

Hi,
I'd make sure these updates are installed KB3020369 & KB3172605 they have consistently worked to chill svchost.exe from acting up which is associated with the update system.