My old laptop has been starting to slow down recently, especially when playing films off my NAS drive / steaming from the net.

The computer is about a 3.5 years old Asus i7 with 4Gb of RAM so should be more than capable of watching a film. I’ve moved a film from NAS to local storage to check network not slowing down.

Virus checker not found anything untoward, what other scans / things should I do to speed it up? I really don’t want to be buying a new laptop so soon as this one cost me a fair few quid what feels like not that long ago.

Thanks

More RAM and SSD

Replace the HD with an SSD.

Run the free version of CCleaner. Be sure to have it clean up all relevant browser/temp/app files etc. Don’t worry about doing a register cleanse unless you know what you’re doing though.

+1 for SSD, re-install windows onto it and it’ll fly.

You can also put your old hard drive into thingy that goes where a DVD drive would go – so you don’t need a great big expensive SSD.

I did this a few months ago with my old laptop which took at least 3 minutes just to wake up from sleep. Now it goes from off to ready in about 20 seconds.

The slowing down is more during video playback, the video pauses / judders quite alot where before it was fine.

You shouldn’t need to change the hardware at all. My laptop is also an old i7 ( 2670QM ) but with 8gb (no ssd) and it’s still zippy and fast to respond.

Can you scan the HDD from another computer? Once started up, viruses can stop virus checking software from finding them (happened to me in the past).

if you do a straight copy of a file to your hard drive, what transfer speed are you getting ?

I think I’d run an independent malware check as well if my laptop noticeably slowed down (you might already do this anyway). Run Malwarebytes free version.

I’ve been using microsoft security essentials virus software. Is malwarebytes better?

You use it as well as, just run it once a week or 2.

Overheating? Dusty fans?

Try MSCONFIG and disable all the nonsense services that run in the background checking for updates every 5 seconds..

On one of my laptops I get judders in the audio which is fixed by just turning the wireless off..

Ok by way of an update;

tonight I have ran;
Microsoft Security essential virus scan – no items found
Malwarebytes scan – no items found
CC cleaner – cleaned a lot of junk out of “somewhere”
Put additional 4GB ram into spare slot from another computer bringing it up to 8GB total

Video is still unwatchably juddery.

Would upgrading to Win10 help?

Play it with VLC/videolan – check codecs?
Might be a cooked /overheating CPU/GPU – sorry.

or

Does it play fine from ‘C:’ drive / is it a NAS LAN transfer problem?

I think I suffered from juddery video many years ago, I think it was sorted out by going into the comp manufacturers website and updating the drivers for the video card or something.maybe not the same issue

Try running the movie off a USB HDD or direct off your laptop HDD to test if it could be your WiFi network. If it is still juddery and displaying the same problems then you need to resolve from the computer end, if not then you need to look at your WiFi network/internet connection.

I can’t imagine updating your OS will make any difference.

Consider putting Linux on it! Ubuntu or Linux Mint are good choices if you persist with any Windows version it will only get slower.

I’ve used Ubuntu previously, we never got on; having to type in coded commands is not my thing…

I’ve updated the video driver and that seems to have done the trick just nicely. Thank you.

Max out the ram and an ssd. Did my old dell and it totally transformed it

especially when playing films off my NAS drive

Replace the HD with an SSD.

Max out the ram

🙄

EDIT just seen that you fixed it – good work.

Microsoft Security Essentials isn’t very good. it missed stuff on my computer that Avast picked up.

I’m a bit of a numpty on computer stuff, so that just made my night. 8)
keep occasionally running ccleaner and malewarebytes tho, even tho they didn’t resolve this issue, they’re part of good housekeeping.

-no-

SSD fixing video playback over lan 🙂

Here is a tip put your hand over the drive bay and see if it’s spinning

Driver update seems to have worked then, general housekeeping and cleanups are jot a bad idea over time, a clean windows install does a lot too if you are good with backups and keeping install media. I’m always amazed how much stuff I end up with in the background over time (well amazed is another word for didn’t get round to uninstalling the 3 bits of software I tried to see which would work best on a work problem….

A quick look in task manager when it’s all booted up is good.

There’s some mixed advice here.

I’d advise against ccleaner. There are good reasons for running it but this isn’t really one of them, and it has the ability to really screw things up if you select the wrong options. If you really must run a clean-up program, TFC is the one I’d recommend. TFC removes temporary files without frapping about with the registry. (“Registry cleaners” at best do nothing useful and at worst cause chaos; your registry isn’t dirty, leave it alone.)

More RAM and SSD is almost always good advice to the question “how can I speed up my computer” but that wasn’t the question posed.

“Use Linux, all versions of Windows slow down” is the typical battle cry of your average Linux fanboy who hasn’t touched a Windows PC since Windows 95 but still feels qualified to comment on it. It is, of course, patent nonsense.

MalwareBytes isn’t better or worse then MSE, they’re different applications which do different things. They’re both very good at what they do. MSE performs quite poorly in AV tests because it’s designed to catch viruses rather than perform well in tests.

Avast isn’t (arguably) better or worse than MSE just because one catches something the other doesn’t. If you take any two AV solutions and run then successively on a badly infected system there’s a high chance that the second will catch things the first missed.

Keeping your system updated is always good advice. Driver updates (as you’ve found), Windows Updates, and updates to third party applications (particularly Java and Flash if you have them installed) will have a bigger impact on the performance and security of your system than any AV product. If you do that, the primary reason to still have AV installed at all is to protect the computer from yourself; clicking on dodgy emails, downloading hooky software and suchlike.

“Use Linux, all versions of Windows slow down” is the typical battle cry of your average Linux fanboy who hasn’t touched a Windows PC since Windows 95 but still feels qualified to comment on it. It is, of course, patent nonsense.

Quite. I’ve been using Linux as my main workstation all day every day for maybe 18 months or two years now, and I DO NOT recommend it for the average user!

Cougar shoud make his own post sticky! 🙂

In honesty, I’ve had a ‘looking after your PC’ article in my head for, oh, about ten years now. I really should get around to writing it at some point.

Cougar deserves an award. Best IT advice on the web.

I have found my laptop slowing down a lot recently, another thing it does a lot of it it keeps turning off the wifi connection on the computer. I try and keep on top of virus scans, malware etc and have Malwarebytes, Ccleaner and Kaspersky intalled.

I am due a free upgrade to Windows 10 soon. Will this help me with speeding it up a bit? Will it fix any driver issues and endless updates that my computer seems determined to install? I get the feeling that its the constant stream of updating stuff which is the issue here. Is there anything I can do to help that?

I’d still be interested to know why the OPs machine has “slowed down”.

All this talk of more RAM and upgrading to a SSD is fine, but what is the underlying problem? Surely if it used to be able to play the video file without any problems, then it should still be able to do so without hardware upgrades.

Personally I’d try a fresh reinstall of Windows before investing in hardware. Start with a clean install, run windows update to get all the fixes that MS have pushed out, and then test the performance from there. If that’s nice and quick, you can then reinstall the programs that you need. Hopefully you’ll end up with a nice fast machine again, unencumbered by the heaps of software that you forgot (or didn’t know) that you installed which are all running processes in the background and eating memory and processor cycles.

Google latency Mon, it’ll help you diagnose process’s that are causing issues. Once you’ve done that if its still slow, look at hardware.

Also go into power management advanced in the and make sure you are handicapping the comp and throttling the CPU, bump them all up to 100%.

My computer was getting really slow and constantly freezing, so I found some Youtube clips and this is one of the better ones ~ [video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmqBFB9emQ8[/video]

Cougar – Moderator

More RAM and SSD is almost always good advice to the question “how can I speed up my computer” but that wasn’t the question posed.

WHAT???
The F’ing title is “Speeding up an aging laptop…” 😆
with various “My old laptop has been starting to slow down recently”
“what other scans / things should I do to speed it up? ”

It’s not a slow laptop, it’s a laptop which has become slow, ergo it needs fixing rather than upgrading. The OP could easily have bought a couple of hundred quid’s worth of hardware and still have had the same issue as the root cause still persisted.

I’d still be interested to know why the OPs machine has “slowed down”.

If you read the thread he appears to have fixed the problem by updating the video drivers.

I’ve no idea why he bothered with that when he should have been fitting a SSD, buying more RAM and re-installing Windows followed by abandoning it for a new OS but I guess some people are just plain lazy.