Pre-Owned laptop running windows 10 is unusably slow

My grandparents gave me there old laptop when the screen broke on mine. They said they recently paid a technician almost $400 to work on it shortly before my grandpa decided he wanted a desktop instead. From the first time I turned it on I haven't been able to do anything on it. It runs so slow I can't even play the solitaire games or anything. The machine originally came with windows vista pre-loaded on it by the manufacturer so I am assuming it is probably far less equipped to be running windows 10 than the basic requirements state. How do I go about doing something to make this thing usable?

Welcome to the Forum.


To start with, we need to know ALL the hardware specs of the old laptop.


You can reinstall Vista, but as it came with Vista, you wont be able to install Win 7 unless you have a retail license.

I updated the specs in my profile.

The information you gave us doesn't help much
From your laptop, follow this tutorial to add all the specs to your profile.
System Info - See Your System Specs


You mentioned that the laptop came with Vista but now it has Win 10.
On the profile you say it has Win 7 64.

Do you have the Win 7 64 installation media and the license key?

I completed the system specs instructions, and it is a presario cq60


And I apologize for the confusion but my desktop is the one running windows 7 64 bit. I originally was trying to fix something with it when I registered with this forum.

4 gb ram, no yellow bangs, and the only things that run on start up are one drive, Synaptics TouchPad Enhancements and Windows Defender notification icon

I still own a CQ60. It came out with Windows 7 and new the cost was around $350 to $400. Used market now runs about $150 if in good condition. It has one physical hard drive that originally was partitioned to hold the factory restore files. The Synaptic TouchPad works quite well. Stock CQ60 came with 3GB RAM.

I have wiped and reinstalled Win7, deleting the factory restore partions so I could load and dual boot with Linux Mint. The CQ60 runs very well on Linux Mint.

Lets do the basic first.
- Schedule a disk check
Open a CMD window as administrator and type:
chkdsk c: /f
It will say the disk is in use and if you want to schedule to next start = yes
Reboot. Pay attention on the results, specially bad clusters, bad blocks or bad sectors.

- Once back to windows, Open a CMD window as administrator and type:
sfc /scannow

You can improve the laptop.
- Buy a 120G SSD (~US$ 25) and a HDD caddy (~US$ 5) to install / replace the ODD. Do a Win 7 or Win 10 32bits clean install on the SSD and move (Using Kari tutorial) C:/Users from the SSD to D:/Users on the HDD. You will have the speed of a SSD and the space of a HDD at low cost.
- Install Win 7 or Win 10 32bits. Internal graphics and other hardware will use some memory leaving around 2.2 G to the OS, so a 32 bits will run better than a 64 bits OS.
Last week I did it on a friends laptop that was taking almost 4 minutes to boot. It's now taking only 30 seconds and it opens programs at a blink of an eye.

Win 7 Home Premium Upgrades