I’m computer competent but no expert. What could I do to pep up my wife’s laptop currently looking like this in task manager whilst idling doing nothing? It is old and nothing special but hope it could run a bit faster to make email and word a less frustrating experience.

Does it have an SSD? If not then that will be the best thing you can do. Oh and the Yahoo mail app loads lots of ads so see if you can ditch that and use Windows Mail client

SSD is the biggest improvement.

More Memory

Solid state drive

Fresh OS installation.

Move to a supported operating system (I think you can still do a W7 -> W10 upgrade for free, can’t you?)

But, to be honest if it came with Windows 7, it’s got to be getting past its best. Is it worth spending more than the laptop is probably worth getting it to soldier on when you can get refurbed recent machines for a few hundred quid?

Thank you. I was thinking more delete stuff or improve settings rather than buy an SSD. I think it is way below the performance it should have.

Will start by uninstalling Yahoo as suggested as only Gmail is used on it (but Yahoo was in the past).

The best thing you could do with that is flatten it and install Windows 10.

It also looks like it’s RAM starved. Right click My Computer (or is it This PC in W7?), pick Porperties and take a screenshot please.

I’d check if it’ll support W10, that will effectively reset your OS and give you something that’s still supported. Also chucking in some more memory is usually a quick win for performance (easiest way to see what you’d need is to go to https://uk.crucial.com/ and use their scanner)

Depending on how easily accessible the drive is on the laptop, an new SSD drive is very cheap:
https://www.cclonline.com/product/261054/CT240BX500SSD1/Solid-State-Drives-SSDs-/Crucial-BX500-240GB-3D-NAND-SATA-2-5-inch-Solid-State-Drive-Internal-/SSD0869/

If it’s omnly got 4gb ram, it might be worth sticking an extra 4 or 8gb stick in it whislt you’ve got it open.

Uninstall anything you dont use, and check the startup tab in task manager to disable anything unessesarily running by itself. or Fresh install of operating system too, as above.

A lot depends on how old/what spec/what condition it is though.

If it’s a 10 year old battered celeron, I’d probably just buy something new.

Not planning to spend anything on it tbh just get it working better with its current facilities; I am not looking for miracles it really was very slow. So thanks for that pointer smokey_jo

I say was because removing Yahoo seems to have helped a lot (or at least it is working better since I did). Might investigate W7 to W10 if it can be done.

There are other computers in the house so this one is not meant to be amazing but would like to think even an old timer can handle email and web.

Are you sure that’s W7? Doesn’t look like the W7 task manager and wsappx is a W10 subsystem task.

Open File Explorer, right-click on This PC and select Properties.. post the dialog that appears.

+1 to installing w10 if you can.

OK, so the fact I got the OS wrong (distracted by a W7 sticker from when W7 was something to boast on a sticker) is going to make me appear rather inept but it seems I have upgraded the OS to W10 in the past. Here is the system spec

Only 4Gb RAM noted as a likely issue too.

Digging in a bit I can also see that there are some W10 updates that have not successfully installed so maybe repeat attempts to do that is slowing something down in the background.

+10 marks to frogstomp for W10 spotting 🙂

One tip, if you click the tabs at the top of task manager, CPU, disk etc, it will order them in whats using the most – from the screenshot, memory and disk usage is high, but it’s not obvious what the culprit is without putting the entries in order.

If you don’t use the touch screen functionality might be worth turning it off and see if it speeds things up.

Digging in a bit I can also see that there are some W10 updates that have not successfully installed so maybe repeat attempts….

That might well be causing a lot of issues, as windows update will always be trying to update, which will clog up the resourses on a lower spec machine.

Id maybe concentrate on getting the updates done and then re-assess the issue.

My HP with W7 was still pretty decent up until the HDD went a few months ago. it was 10 years old and I’d only updated the OS to W10 in Feb.

don’t know if any of these made a difference but:

ran windows own anti virus rather than third party
ran malwarebytes every so often
ran ccleaner every so often (just the tidy up tool)
disabled stuff from opening on start up (configsys?)
Think I had auto defrag but did defrags from time to time

@mattyfez, I think you are right. I seem to have caused an unblocking and they are now installing. Some of them are fairly chunky it seems from install time.

Will check up on some of these other suggestions too.

there are some W10 updates that have not successfully installed

Are you short on disk space? That may be stopping the updates from happening and also affecting page file performance (a disk-based extension of the physical memory).

Depending on how up to date your Windows installation is, you can get a cursory view of potential issues by running Device Performance & Health (type that into the search bar at the bottom).

If you’re short on storage, try running Disk Clean Up (type that into the search bar at the bottom) to see if it suggests anything that can be safely deleted.

Are you sure that’s W7? Doesn’t look like the W7 task manager and wsappx is a W10 subsystem task.

Nice catch, it’s part of the Store. I didn’t look at the process names. Disk space is a very good shout too.

“Only” 4GB should be fine for the usage case. That CPU’s pretty toilet though and there’s not much you can do about that.

That CPU’s pretty toilet though

Quote of the thread 🙂

16 Chrome Tabs taking up an 1/8 of your total memory probably isn’t helping either 😀

4gb is bad, but to quantify – my son’s i3 went from something like 5mins to boot to ~30secs to boot by upgrading to SSD.
I would suggest you do both RAM + SSD and it will transform it for ~100 pounds.

As said above the processor is sloooooowwwwwww. Cheapest option is a similar sized SSD – £50 max plus maybe a tenner for a usb ‘external case’ – you’ll use this to mirror the drive. Then you can turn the old HD into a pare external HD once you are happy with the ‘mirroring’.

Memory will help , but that’s yet more money.

4gb is bad, but to quantify – my son’s i3

Depends on the age/version of the processor.

Case in point, I recently bought an emergency replacement laptop for £400, latest gen i3 and fast 4gb ram… 128gb SSD not my first choice of spec but I had a budget and I had to have it next day.

It is very quick and responsive, in terms of general internetting, VPN, RDP, watching films etc.
I can tell it struggles a little when mulititasking – loads of apps open etc, but it’s actually really supprised me.
I’ve set it up very clean and light though, firefox with Ublock origin, removed the crapware that came whith it, minimal start up apps etc.

There’s a fair amount of stuff running for “doing nothing” – looks like it’s installing updates (wsappx and Windows Malicious Software tool) and Chrome is taking the piss too with its 16 processes.

Other people are more expert than me, but I’d definitely look at CCleaner (or something similar) to understand what processes are running on startup and turn some of them off, and what services are enabled that can be turned off (tablet mode/ touch input, for example, and various others).
You can also set your network (wifi or ethernet) as ‘metered’, to give you more control of when Windows updates install themselves, but probably not advisable unless you/ your wife will routinely remember to go and manually check updates.

For comparison I had a Lenovo with an i3 and 4gb ram. Slow as ****. Like actual anger inducing slowness. Flung an 8gb chip (4gb onboard so 12gb total) and one of those Crucial BX100 SSDs in and it’s night and day.

12gb is totally overkill but it was about as cheap as a 4gb chip so why not. SSD is the key though and you can always use it in another machine in the future. Fling on a freshly downloaded install and you will have none of the failed updates or OEM crapware.

Depending on how you updated to 10 you may have the 7 install still lurkng on the HD which if removed would free up a bit of space pretty quickly.

I’d definitely look at CCleaner

I definitely wouldn’t unless you know what you’re doing.