How to make my laptop run faster or time to replace

EveryWhere · 10 July 2018 at 11:26AM

silvercar wrote: »

Not sure if my Toshiba laptop is worth spending money on, or whether I should buy new.

Current spec (according to CCleaner) is:
Windows 10 64-bit
Intel core i3-2330M
CPU @220GHz
6.0 GB RAM
Intel Graphics HD 3000

Hard drive 600GB (300 on C and 300 on D, both less than 50% full)

Problem is that the machine is very slow, and has been getting worse over the last few months.

We have internet speed of over 50MB, so that isn't the issue.

Any advice gratefully received.

(First question may be why 64 bit, and the answer is that is what I bought, don't know why, probably a special offer)

That would be a 640 GB HDD. I wouldn't necessarily go rushing out to buy a 500 GB SSD if you are not utilising 500 GB using your Toshiba. I make do with 120GB. £25 instead of £90.

At which model number are we looking? Toshiba Satellite C670-17L?
Quoting the Part No. on the bottom of the machine is best. It will be something like; PSC3UE-01Y009EN

GunJack · 10 July 2018 at 11:58AM

silvercar wrote: »

Current spec (according to CCleaner) is:
Windows 10 64-bit
Intel core i3-2330M
CPU @220GHz
6.0 GB RAM
Intel Graphics HD 3000

Think the only thing wrong with that machine (from a performance point of view) is the bit in bold...that spec is, on paper, better than any machine I possess. Stick W7 on it and you'll see a difference. Stick W7 and a SSD in it and you'll wonder what MS are doing with W10 that so many machines are now slow/bits don't work properly/etc.

EveryWhere · 10 July 2018 at 12:05PM

Don't neglect to utilise the Toshiba Media Creator program to create your Recovery media before doing anything else.

If it's the machine I described, the actuall drive swap will take just a few minutes; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FpDmUA0G9A

I would always choose a clean install of the Operating System to the new drive, as opposed to cloning all the old crud to the new drive.

grahamgoo · 10 July 2018 at 3:32PM

One other thing to check is how many programs are starting up in the background when you boot up. My O.H. had a similar issue that was resolved by removing unnecessary stuff from startup.

Search "Windows 10 startup programs" for further info e.g. https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/how-to/windows/remove-windows-10-startup-programs-3615075/

silvercar · 15 July 2018 at 5:45PM

Thank you to everyone for taking the time to reply.

I tried Malware and Glary, but the machine ground to a halt - ccleaner took 20 minutes to load!

Thanks to Debbie Savard and grumpycrab I started removing loads of stuff. Avast, Avira and Malware have now all gone, along with facebook gamesroom, blackberry and a load of old stuff that seemed to be going on in the background.

I'm now using Windows defender along with its chrome extension and everything seems to be operating at a reasonable speed.

Thanks again

that · 15 July 2018 at 9:33PM

in conjunction with amazon, you could try https://flubit.com/

oscarward · 17 July 2018 at 11:10AM

Hi
I had a similar problem with a acer netbook. intel atom , 1gb ram and 250gb hd. I use it when travelling as it has good battery life and is small enough to fit in a pocket and covers the essentials of email and simple surfing. About 6 years old.

It had win 7 starter originally which I upgraded to win 10 basic when it was being offered for free. It was ok initially with win 10 but the latest upgrade of version has caused it to run like a dog.

On investigation cpu was 90% or more and disc 99%.

Because it was the basic version of W10 there was no choice about updating so I left it for a day to just run through. But it still ran very slowly after all updates were done cpu was about 30% and disc still above 80%

After a bit of digging I found a website that mentioned windows defender was causing it, the latest version had some odd side effects and couldn't be disabled easily on the basic version. Basically it was doing a lot of disc thrashing , no one seemed to know why.

There was a hack to the registry which disables defender and this cured the problem. Performance still not as good pre version upgrade but useable. CPU now 10-15% and disc 5% ish.

I fitted it with a freeby AV to safeguard and it is now useable again.

HTH

EveryWhere · 17 July 2018 at 2:36PM

oscarward wrote: »

Hi
I had a similar problem with a acer netbook. intel atom , 1gb ram and 250gb hd. I use it when travelling as it has good battery life and is small enough to fit in a pocket and covers the essentials of email and simple surfing. About 6 years old.

It had win 7 starter originally which I upgraded to win 10 basic when it was being offered for free. It was ok initially with win 10 but the latest upgrade of version has caused it to run like a dog.

On investigation cpu was 90% or more and disc 99%.

Because it was the basic version of W10 there was no choice about updating so I left it for a day to just run through. But it still ran very slowly after all updates were done cpu was about 30% and disc still above 80%

After a bit of digging I found a website that mentioned windows defender was causing it, the latest version had some odd side effects and couldn't be disabled easily on the basic version. Basically it was doing a lot of disc thrashing , no one seemed to know why.

There was a hack to the registry which disables defender and this cured the problem. Performance still not as good pre version upgrade but useable. CPU now 10-15% and disc 5% ish.

I fitted it with a freeby AV to safeguard and it is now useable again.

HTH

I fitted my ACER Netbook with SSD. Though still running Windows 7.

If I were you I would install Windows 7 Pro and then 'upgrade' to Windows 10 Pro, to give yourself a bit more control over feature updates.

How to make my laptop run faster or time to replace

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