Why is my computer slow?

[GRoston]

Hopefully, someone can point me in a useful direction.

[For the purposes of this posting, I will speak to MS Excel, but the same problem happens with other programs as well.] If I click on the Excel icon, it launches immediately. If I then tell it to open a XLS file, that too happens right away. However, if I double-click the XLS file, it typically takes 15+ seconds for the file to open.

What on earth is going on?

 

[wither 2]

As a first cut, I suggest that you go to All Programs, Accessories, system Tools and click on Disk Cleanup. Select Drive C: When it tells you how much space it can recover, make sure you select Temporary Files (in addition to Temporary Internet Files) and Recycle Bin. Let it run and then reboot. Does that help? Out of curiosity, let me know how much space it says it can recover and the amount of free space on your C: drive. Is it a hard disk or SSD?

 

[GRoston]

wither 2: Thanks for the reply. The disk is fairly clean - it is a hard disk, the C: partition is 270 GB, and there are 116 GB free. Recycle Bin is limited to 6 GB, but currently is storing only several hundred MB. Disk Cleanup could have recovered a total of 160 MB, most of which should probably not be deleted. Seriously doubt that that is the problem. I will be replacing the HD with a SSD in a few weeks...

 

[wither 2]

Did you do the disk cleanup? Even though you have lots of free space, that 160 MB of files can cause a problem with allocation of free space and write/read times. Since you're going to replace the hard drive shortly, I guess there's no need in pursuing this further, unless you want to.