Hi folks
What I really do not need over new year is to re build my wife’s buisness laptop which is running epically slow. Can anyone recommend any utilities that are worth trying that could speed things up and avoid a re build.

Thanks in advance

C Cleaner can remove a lot of bulk rubbish from HDD, get it below 70% capacity to work at its best. Depending on the OS you may want to defrag it too.

MalwareBytes (free edition ) will, well remove most if not all malware she might have picked up – 99% of slow PCs we get in are down to that. If it finds anything continue to keep running as many times as it takes to come up clear.

PC Decrapifyer will remove unwanted programmes and blotware.

Try to get as much dust and fluf out of the cooling vents with a vacuum – more effective than most people think.

That’s all free software – in our place (it support) we use the commercial versions of those and together with a single, good AV consider hardware to be “as good as it’ll get” after all that.

Any reason for avoiding a rebuild….
If it’s business make sure everything important is backed up, for my day to day it all sits in Google drive. If you have the installation media then a rebuild is the quickest and easiest route. Download all the current drivers, save them to the cloud and make an image when done.

C Cleaner can remove a lot of bulk rubbish from HDD,

It can also cause mayhem. Use TFC instead (google ‘tfc oldtimer’).

MalwareBytes (free edition ) will, well remove most if not all malware she might have picked up – 99% of slow PCs we get in are down to that. If it finds anything continue to keep running as many times as it takes to come up clear.

Good advice.

What AV are you using? Ripping it out and using Microsoft Security Essentials (Windows 7) or Defender (8/10) might make a big difference.

If you have the installation media then a rebuild is the quickest and easiest route. Download all the current drivers, save them to the cloud and make an image when done.

There’s probably a recovery partition, makes life much easier.

Reading with interest as my laptop is slowing down and on start up showed 106 processes running most of which I don’t know anything about. Will Google when I have time to see which I can delete but will try the above advice first, cheers.

There’s probably a recovery partition, makes life much easier.

I’m coming across a few who don’t these days, Dell prompts you to make your own media when you get the laptop. Also it relies on still having any other software you may need that doesn’t come on download.

A rebuild onto a new hard drive wouldn’t be a bad idea. If you miss something you still got the old one. And a solid state ssd drive will be even faster.

deepreddave (&juggins if your feeling brave) Stopping programs starting on boot
Obviously don’t rush in like bull in a china shop but as you don’t delete them just disable them, you can re-enable them if needed