Why is my computer doing things more slowly?

[GRoston]

Over the past several weeks, my Win 7 Pro computer seems to be doing things much more slowly than previously. For example, in the past, when I'd drag an item from an Outlook email onto the desktop, the item's icon would appear on the desktop almost immediately. Now, I have to wait 5-10 seconds to see the icon. I have checked my computer for viruses and have not found any. What else could the problem be? I am somewhat suspicious of Avast AntiVirus, since it seems to do a lot of disk thrashing, but nothing else comes to mind.

 

[siliconbeaver]

maybe your Outlook email needs a new setup.

Outlook 2010 will not connect to Gmail Solved - Windows 10 Forums (sevenforums.com)

Outlook ’07 and Gmail: am I SOL? - Windows 10 Forums (sevenforums.com)

 

[Megahertz07]

Lets do the basic
Open a CMD window as administrator and type:
chkdsk c: /f
It will say your disk is in use and ask if you want to schedule to next start = yes
Restart
Pay attention on the results, specially bad blocks, bad clusters, bad sectors etc

Back to Windows, open a CMD window as administrator and type:
sfc /scannow

If it finds any corrupted files, fixing or not, reboot and run again

 

[GRoston]

siliconbeaver - Nothing to do with Outlook, see another example below Megahertz07 - Did both and nothing unusual was reported - can show you the photos of the results

One more example of slowness: I have an XLSX file on a local drive that is 55 kB in size and has nothing but data. When I double click it, a full 17 seconds elapsed before I saw the Excel info and the file was opened at about 20 seconds. However, if I click Excel in the Start menu, it opens within a second or two, and then opening the file takes another second or two.

 

[Megahertz07]

Try to compress the Outlook data file (pst file)
How big are the pst files?
How much free space you have on C: partition?

 

[GRoston]

Megahertz07: Outlook has nothing to do with the issue. I show 107 GB free on a 270 GB partition.

 

[siliconbeaver]

Frankly, it's a problem no good solution unless clean-reinstall.

you can try

1. disk scan (disk integrity, disk error, or even disk failure. If any, better replace disk)
2. virus infected scan

above two included in Megahertz07's suggestion.

3. remove anti-virus software if any

Others things, such as clean registry, ccleaner, clean folders of temp or user, , , indeed cannot make disk running faster. (at best, they could save some disk room for you), NOT helpful.

clean re-install OS. If OS running slow. It's helpful. and It's widely used.
re-install MS Office if MS Office running slow (re-install will fix those corrupted files or broken links)
re-install apps (like Outlook you mentioned) which is running slow.

If the computer is old, try to replace disk to SSD. This can see significant performance boost. For this reason, all of my laptops, new or old, any OS (Win 7 or 11), upgraded to SSD.

If you do clean re-install, when done, you better make its image backup. In future, if same problem recurs, simply image recovery. it saves time (no need to debug. Win 7 OS image recovery only takes 5-10 min)

 

[Megahertz07]

Megahertz07: Outlook has nothing to do with the issue. I show 107 GB free on a 270 GB partition.

You mentioned Outlook on the first post.


Did you already try a Clean boot?