Computer Malware-Free but still Slooow

rabbitz · Jan 12, 2015

Hi there,

I offered to help my neighbor with her laptop:

Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit, SP 1
HP G62 laptop
Athlon dual core 2.20 GHz
3 Gig RAM
Using FireFox
All software up to date

The wonderful malware forum declared it malware free and suggested I come here since the computer is still intermittently sloooow.

What I noticed:
Startup is okay
Slooowness is totally intermittent -- it basically "hangs" sometimes and sometimes not.
There are a lot of unresponsive scripts in Fire Fox (which is up to date)
I noticed the hard drive runs a lot and for a long time for no apparent reason.
I checked the processes and didn't notice anything unusual hogging a lot of resources except ATI Catalysts programs, which I temporarily stopped with no effect.

Any suggestions?

Thank you!

plodr · Jan 13, 2015

If the slowness is associated with web surfing in Firefox, launch FF with all the addons disabled and see if it helps speed things up. If it does, start enabling the addons two at a time and surfing until you notice a slowdown. One or both of those two is the problem.

This describes one of the G62 models as having "below average performance".
Source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2365388,00.asp
since it is a computer from 2010, it is going on 5 years old so it will be noticeably slower than newer computers.

rabbitz · Jan 13, 2015

Thank you -- I checked the add-ons (and plugins) and there was just one add on that I added after noticing the constant script hangups.

It looks like she has a backup partition -- do you suppose a clean reinstall of windows on C: will help? (I've never done it)?

Thank you!

plodr · Jan 13, 2015

I only recommend a clean install in dire circumstances. Remember this computer is 4 1/2 years old. If you did a clean reinstall, you'd be looking at doing 4 1/2 years of Windows patches! Clean off the drek that has collected and defrag after doing that. I'm sure it will be peppier than it was just by doing that.

I noticed the hard drive runs a lot and for a long time for no apparent reason.
Click to expand...

My husband's Win 7 Pro does that. I turned off indexing hoping that would quiet it down. It hasn't. Maybe his hard drive is just noisier than the other computers.
If indexing is on, turn it off and see if that helps.

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Computer Malware-Free but still Slooow

rabbitz Private E-2

plodr MajorGeek Super Extraordinaire Moderator Staff Member

rabbitz Private E-2

plodr MajorGeek Super Extraordinaire Moderator Staff Member