SOLVED Windows 7 SO SLOW (suddenly)

[TrainableMan]

HDs can fail at any time but most last 3 to 5 years. Search indexing does occur a lot at the very start of W7 usage to make searches faster but nothing that should cause a good drive to go bad. As with any product there are some duds that fail right away. It is one reason we recommend a regular scheduled back-up to an external drive which is normally turned off. You still need to use a good anti-virus but a back-up provides minimal loss from virus damage or HD failure. Keeping the back-up on an external drive that is turned off helps prevent the virus from spreading to your back-up at the time of infection. It is of course still possible to back-up infected files to the drive at the next scheduled back-up but hopefully you realize the problem before that point.

Be sure to reinstall a good active AV software right away with this new install. And once you get it set up how you want it and have all your programs/settings installed you should create a back-up if you have a back-up drive. If not, consider getting one when you can.

 

[hopeless]

SLOW WINDOWNS 7

I am another sufferer of slow windows 7 but on my wifes not often used acer i3 laptop and now at work with my bosses toshiba i5 home laptop also not often used. It is painfull but very much like the previous laptop my wife had with windows vista on it, also my bosses daily laptop with vista on it which is also very slow.

I am shocked that computers could be like this as i have windows xp installed on my new amd desktop at home (luckily with a ssd hard drive which is blindingly fast) and my office desktop is a windows 7 hp which had the windows xp downgrade option as we dont run the latest version of autocad and other add ons which need xp. I guess i am lucky but i have not experienced this slow running issue on these other computer much until my wife complained.

The acer laptop was bought not that long after win 7 came out and strangely enough it had 2gb of ram which at the time was not uncommon. Looking at the ram usage now (is it nearly 2 years old) it had 1.5gb of ram used just sitting there in idle which would have included the video card memory. My next option was to upgrade ram to 4gb but this had not much impact but i did notice the performance score went up from about 4 to 4.8, big deal! I checked my win xp desktop and it has about 0.5gb memory use at idle, big difference.

I did read another post somewhere else which suggested to remove many programs from loading in memory at startup but have not gone there yet as my wife is now on laptop no. 3 just purchased with i7 chip and win 7 but wanting to upgrade to win 8. She does use the ipad a lot more than the laptop so we will see how long it takes for this new machine to go pear shaped. such is life. why is this upgrade mentality so prevalent.

signed a currently very happy win xp user.

 

[TrainableMan]

hopeless,

There could be many things causing your slow computers. The two biggest possibilities are a virus or the anti-virus installed to protect from viruses.

Then yes you mentioned shutting down unneeded startup programs and services. Prime examples of this are Adobe updater, java updater, and various printer garbage.

You also mention they are rarely used. Because they are rarely used they are probably not left on either. Windows Updates come out all the time and when the computer is online it constantly tries to download and install which puts a tremendous workload on your internet connection as well as adds some CPU workload. Your choice is to disable windows updates and then take responsibility to run them manually periodically.

Virus scans may also be running in the background and that takes CPU. Search indexes also need to be rebuilt and that takes CPU every so often.

You might try leaving the computer connected overnight once a week and schedule virus scans and maybe a back-up for that time, and allow it to get updates etc to see if things work smoother. And still delete &/or disable unneeded startup programs and services.

This thread is old so I have closed it. hopeless, if you have an actual question please feel free to start a new thread, as this one was solved over a year ago.