I bought my daughters a net book, from a supermarket, (yes yes) and it was cheap ish £180 (yes yes) with a view to them using it for homework, basic Google research and word PowerPoint that sort of thing.

It’s a medion ankoya and did get reasonable reviews but it is so slow now. Takes ages to boot up and the keyboard seems to be working on a 30 second lag.

I’ve recently updated to Windows 10 to see if this helps but it hasn’t really, all it does where starting up is sound like it is forever accessing the hard disk.

So I wondered if there is anyway of finding any programmes that may be lurking in the background, that are not essential, that I can get rid of safely, that might be draining the speed.

It’s very frustrating, every time they come to do homework, it’s a faff and they end up using my work laptop.

Just to add, when I switched it on tonight it was doing what appeared to be another Windows 10 update so I don’t know if these are coming through thick and fast and just causing the problem?

How much crap is on it? Anything else installed? Ivd generally suggest going back to the first install state and going from there though I’m sure in a minute somebody will tell you an SSD will fix everything…
Can you back up, reinstall then do the win 10 or is there a way to do a clean win 10?

Not much crap on it as it’s always been pretty poor to use.
No other software installed except a canon printer driver package, that came with the printer.

Is the drive full? What does task manager say when it’s running what’s being chewed up? Cpu, ram or disk?
You sure there is nothing else installed also see what’s running in task manager at start uo

Updates could well be causing an issue.. But these kind of laptops are just not that fast. Any type of multi tasking will bring it to it’s knees, such as running a virus scan whilst watching iplayer.

First port of call is a clean windows install.. I.e. A clean Microsoft one, not a hp/acer/whatever image.

If you have your windows 10 licence key now.. It’s locked to that laptop.. So if you’ve done an in place upgrade, it’ll be worth reformatting and reinstalling a virgin fresh copy.

There are also a myriad of features and services you can disable…too many to list but if you do a Google search for optimising (win 10 for example) on low power PC’s you should get plenty of tweaking option.

Also now you have your windows 10..youve got it for that laptop.. So you can always reinstall it if you want.. So if performance is sstil too bad you could install Linux Mint instead.. It’s very user friendly these days and perfect for a general media /Internet machine.

IME updates can grind older machines to a near halt. Try leaving on overnight to complete the update.

I’ll check the task manager as a starting point…good plan.

Does it have any anti-virus on it? An old one of ours did and it slowed it down really badly.

Also open msconfig (it’s easy, Google how to do it on Windows 10)
And disable a bunch of start up apps.. You’ll probably find things like printer software, Adobe reader, all sorts of other stuff all start up when your machine starts up and checks for updates and whatnot .. Which will destroy performance on a low spec machine.. Disable a bunch of that.. You don’t need your printer software running in the background when your not printing for example.. Printer software should only start when you press print.

Don’t disable vital apps though, like graphics drivers, touch pad drivers etc. If in doubt Google it.

I would just format it and install Ubuntu myself.

I’ve been flitting between mint and Ubuntu on my low spec ‘bedroom media pc’ both are great, Linux mint seems more complete and a bit easier, Ubuntu having a nicer look about it.

Linux is definitely an option for the OP I think.. If his window optimisation doesn’t work too well.

Thanks again all. Must confess that some of your suggestions are going over my head as I am a bit of an ignorant PC operator, having an it help desk for work machine problems.
I’ll start simple and see how it goes.

It’s got malwarebytes on it, just remembered.

Just remember.. Doing more than one thing at once on a machine like that will grind it to a halt.. Things like malware bytes scans are best started when you’re about to go out for dinner or whatever, so it can chug away.

Have a look here for starters Win 10 performance tweaks

I have a PC with an Atom CPU similar to older netbooks. I put an ssd in it and that made a huge difference as did windows 10. Problem now though is that modern webpages are simply too much for it.

If it’s an older Netbook, it’ll have 1Gb of RAM in it. That was part of MS’s definition of ‘Netbook’ for licensing purposes. You can almost certainly swap the 1Gb stick for a 2Gb stick, and it’ll almost certainly turn it into a different machine.

A Malwarebytes scan won’t hurt either.

My aging Samsung N150 now has a 2Gb RAM stick and Mint (noticeably faster than Ubuntu).

It’s a great machine. Battery lasts forever and for web browsing / word processing / hooking into an external projector, it’s perfect.