Solved System Slowing Down

[miken707]

My (old) Dell Inspiron is slowing down in the last month or 2. I am running Win-7 Home premium 64 bit
I have checked for viruses and checked the startups, nothing new. I thought it might be internet related, but tasks that do not use the internet have also slowed down noticeably. I did have problems with updates, but following a thread here I fixed that and now am current on updates.

Any suggestions?

 

[Ranger4]

Hi miken707, welcome to the Forum.

How full is your Hard Drive?. Windows needs at least 10% free space. Once the drive gets less than this the computer slows down as Windows takes extra time loading & unloading files as they are opened & closed.

 

[miken707]

Thanks for your reply. I should have included more information in my initial post. The OS is on a SSD and there is 48GB of 145 free. The Data is on a separate drive and I've only used 64 GB of 823.

 

[Ranger4]

Thanks for getting back. Do you open a lot of programs when you start the computer?.

Right click on the Task Bar & select Task Manager, when that opens click on the Processes tab & see what you have running on the computer. This will give you an indication of how many programs are running & if there are a lot, particularly ones you don't need, you can close them.

 

[miken707]

I usually have Chrome and Firefox open and Windows Explorer. Sometimes I'll have Excel or another Office app open, but not a large numbers. I usually have 2 or 3 tabs open on the browsers.

 

[Ranger4]

Having 2 browser open at the same time will slow things down, particularly if your internet speed is slow. Try running on one browser for a while & see if the computer runs faster.

 

[Megahertz07]

You have 4G of memory. Is your Win 7 32 or 64 bits?
Open device manager to see if you have any yellow alert of missing driver.

 

[miken707]

I have 64-bit with 4GB memory. I checked Device Mgr and saw a warning about the printer driver so I downloaded the latest from HP but in fact I already had the latest.

Concerning the 2 browsers: I have running 2 open for several years because I have 2 Gmail accounts and don't like to log in and out all the time to check mail. The slowdown is recent. However, right now I only have Chrome open. I'll see if there is any difference.

 

[JoWazzoo]

Why not 2 tabs in one browser and Bookmark? For Gmail - you can easily switch accounts so even 2 tabs are not needed. Running two browsers just to check Gmail accounts is a bit much. There are also a number of apps than can be arn independent opf browsers to check Gmail accounts. Just a thought...

 

[Megahertz07]

Open Win update and run Check for update. If it runs forever it has a problem and can explain the computer slow down.

 

[miken707]

Win Update works now. I had to set the date back to Dec 1 to get last month's update, but after that everything works with the update (for now).