Laptop still slow even after replacing the HDD!

Hey all!

Replaced the HDD with a new one and obviously installed a fresh os - windows 7. Didn't move anything over from the old HDD, installed all drivers from the laptop site and no programs except for opera browser, and yet...it is still really slow. Extremely frustrating.

If i move fast between tasks, like opening a window or a menu, it takes time to load - the start menu will actually say "loading" for a fraction of a second before the contents show.

Moving between tabs on my browser is an absolute nightmare. The browser will actually freeze with "(not responding)" for a few seconds.

Below are the specs. How can i fix this?


This is the typical state


These programs are recent. Laptop was slow even before installing any programs, except for the drivers.

It was slow even before you installed Avast and Opera?

Run Crystaldiskmark once. What is the HDD speed?


Download – Crystal Dew World

Are there any yellow exclamation marks in Device Manager?

Make and model of laptop?

The motherboard is running a little hot though. That may be a cause for concern.

You should of got a SSD drive laptop hds on spin at 5000 RPM so are slow you have a 64 bit windows but only 4gig of RAM I would expect it to be slow Photoshop will had a lot of rubbish and torrent and VPN will make it crawl. A SSD and more RAM would transform it as SSD is 10 times faster and 480 but only £60

Open device manager. Is there any yellow alerts of missing drivers?

Open Windows Update. Manually search for updates. Does it search forever?

F22 Simpilot said:

It was slow even before you installed Avast and Opera?

Run Crystaldiskmark once. What is the HDD speed?


Download – Crystal Dew World

Are there any yellow exclamation marks in Device Manager?

Make and model of laptop?

The motherboard is running a little hot though. That may be a cause for concern.

Yes Simpilot, it was slow even before Avast and Opera



No Yellow exclamations

HP DV6-3042ee

samuria said:

You should of got a SSD drive laptop hds on spin at 5000 RPM so are slow you have a 64 bit windows but only 4gig of RAM I would expect it to be slow Photoshop will had a lot of rubbish and torrent and VPN will make it crawl. A SSD and more RAM would transform it as SSD is 10 times faster and 480 but only £60

Yes i get what you're saying. But even though SSDs "could" be faster, HDDs are not supposed to inherently be slow. And definitely not as slow as my laptop. Also, my laptop was slow before Photoshop or any of the installed apps.

Megahertz07 said:

Open device manager. Is there any yellow alerts of missing drivers?

Open Windows Update. Manually search for updates. Does it search forever?

No yellow alerts in device manager. Manual searching for update takes about 4 mins to finish.

Your TOSHIBA MQ04ABF100 is SATA 600 and your SATA controller is 300.
But this doesn't make any difference as I never saw a desktop (7200 RPM) SATA 600 disk faster than 180 MB/s.

As your TOSHIBA MQ04ABF100 is a laptop disk it runs at 5400 RPM and I will be surprised if it is faster than 50 MB/s.

My suggestion is to buy a small (128G) SSD for windows and programs and use the HDD for data only (moving C:\users to D:\users).

Download and run CrystalDiskMark
Post the results as an attachment.

I suggest that you try a clean boot to see if there's anything running in the background that's gobbling up resources.