Machine has slowed down considerably!!

taylormah said:

I have hp laptop with T7500 C2Duo and 3GB ram/32bit Win7 Ultimate. It used to be pretty fast machine but now almost everything has slowed down. Windows search takes almost 5-7 seconds to find programs or files and firefox takes 10 seconds+ for a start, chrome hangs often, program freeze frequently. I realized today while using a friend's laptop, having a P7350/4GB/64bit Vista, how fast programs should open on a machine like this. It was day-night difference in performance. Windows search was blazing fast and firefox started in under one second. Yes, we have 1gb difference of ram, but processor speeds are almost identical. I do have more programs installed and more data on hard drive, but that should not make a difference in program starup times. What can I do to make and keep my windows performing better and faster. Fresh install is one option, but what else can I do to maintain the briskness of OS???

If you have loads of stuff on your harddrive, cookies, viruses... All of theese slow down your computer. A clean install will make your pc a lot faster, but you should also check for missing drivers, since those cause slow down. Just go to device manager and check for yellow triangles

Common complaint. Lets make sure it is not something with more ramafications than just speed.

Run a full scan with your Anti Virus

Download and run this
Malwarebytes.org

Turn off your antivirus and see how it runs

Do a disc clean. Go to c drive

Do a scan C drive properties

Do a defrag

Then try in safe mode (tap f8 repeatedly during boot(
If this runs fast, then we will do a clean boot to determine cause if the problem
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

I would also do a memory diaganosis over night (6 hours)
Type that phase in search to get started.

Finally, you did not fill in system specs. How much memory do you have?
Is is all being recognized?

taylormah said:

I have hp laptop with T7500 C2Duo and 3GB ram/32bit Win7 Ultimate. It used to be pretty fast machine but now almost everything has slowed down. Windows search takes almost 5-7 seconds to find programs or files and firefox takes 10 seconds+ for a start, chrome hangs often, program freeze frequently. I realized today while using a friend's laptop, having a P7350/4GB/64bit Vista, how fast programs should open on a machine like this. It was day-night difference in performance. Windows search was blazing fast and firefox started in under one second. Yes, we have 1gb difference of ram, but processor speeds are almost identical. I do have more programs installed and more data on hard drive, but that should not make a difference in program starup times. What can I do to make and keep my windows performing better and faster. Fresh install is one option, but what else can I do to maintain the briskness of OS???

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Low disk space is one possible cause. If you need to free up space you can delete unneeded system restore points and shadow copies (the amount of space used can be adjusted in System Protection). I would also suggest using Perfectdisk or Puran defrag which both have a boot-time option for defragging system files.

This is weird. I have a machine with a T7500 C2Duo processor & 4 GB ram and up until a couple of days ago it was quite snappy, but now it is running like molasses also. I have tried various things, System restore to several days ago, SFC, malware scans, but so far nothing is helping to restore the speed. I'm still working on it.

taylormah said:

Similar situation here. I update my drivers every month, I use MS Security Essentials and I tried using PC without it, and not much increase in speed. I defrag regularly, clean registry and hard disk with CCleaner regularly, I have only 7 programs starting with windows and they are audio and intel programs, my data/music/video files are on a separate partition already which are daily defraged, I have 40GB space free on the system partition. Everything I am doing should keep the pc in healthy and snappy state, but I am still trying to figure out what could be keeping it slow. Any other ideas guys??

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You could try a process explorer, such as Process Hacker to view all active processes and CPU usage.

Well I think I finally figured out the cause of my particular problem with W7 slowing down all of a sudden. It appears to have been caused by an update to Comodo Firewall aka Comodo Internet Security. They just issued a new update (587) that appears to have fixed the problem, at least for me.

If you have Comodo Firewall installed, open the program, go to the misc tab, click update and let it update.

Internet Security Suites of all kinds, from all manufacturers will at some point cause problems.

I personally don't recommend them as there really is no need for them at all.

A good Anti Virus (MSE) and Anti-Malware (MalwareBytes and Spybot) scans every so often, and good surfing practices, are all that is really needed.