South West Bikers | Motorcycle Forum

Morning everyone
My laptop is running slow even though im using an external hard drive to keep the crap off
Any advice would be grateful
martyn

do a full virus scan , go to the hard drive settings and run the disc clean , how long since you defraged it ? do thgat as well, op[en up the back up system and remove backups older than say a week or month, load and run adaware that will sort out some nasties , I have downloaded a program called crap cleaner , that sorts out all the rubbish , and deletes it ,

Download this It will get rid of any spyware/trojans.

I use this It is a bloody good defragger, unlike windows defrag you can use the laptop while the program is running in the background.

I use this to clean up my system.


Oh!!!!!!

By the way, if you have one of them new laptops with a solid state hard drive (ssd) then I advise not to defrag it, apparently they don't like it.

if you use windows 8 or 8.1 (or even 10) then its really easy to diagnose system issues using the task manager (ctrl shift esc) make sure your HDD (hard drive C:\) isnt being overwhelmed (high usage) if it is then post a screenshot should be able to diagnose further

All good advice above, CCleaner is good at finding and removing unnecessary files but it also has a Registry cleaner facility which is really useful for resolving any issues with the registry which might be causing problems, I'd recommend running both the disk cleaner and the registry cleaner.

Make sure your antivirus is up to date and run a full scan, and another vote for Malwarebytes.

You don't say how old your laptop is or what operating system it's running. Is it getting hot, as sometimes the CPU cooler can get clogged with dust meaning it doesn't work very well which then causes the CPU to overheat, the CPU will then start to run at slower speeds to try to cool down which will noticeably affect performance.

Have a look in the performance section of task manager when the laptop is running slow and check whether the CPU, memory or disk is running at 100% as this will show you whether there is a bottleneck. Also if you are running programs from your external hard drive rather than just using it to store data this could affect performance as your USB connections data transfer rate will possibly not be fast enough.

Hope that helps.

As pieeater says the correct thing to do will not be clear until we know if it has always been slow or if it has happened recently and, if so, why.