Thanks all very useful information....
Obviously this means having to remove a lot of unwanted things for me like Cortana etc. etc. all over again which whilst a chore and if I've understood it all correctly should mean a lot faster boot ups, in my case say from roughly 60 secs down to what you showed in your clip 15 - 20 secs ?
Would it then be necessary to buy an SDD ?
There is nothing to manually remove, the format removes everything in seconds. When you install W10 again Cortana and all the other stuff that goes with W10 is already there but what you will have lost is any customisation. You are starting with a clean sheet... W10 and nothing else.
You would only know by trying a clean install as to whether that gave you the gains you seek.
Last edited by Mooly; 02 Aug 2017 at 09:35.
Thanks for all your great help. Finally would it then not be necessary to buy an SDD any more.... ?
You would only know that by seeing whether a clean install resolved all your slowdowns, or at least made it all more acceptable.
To give you an idea I have a Dell laptop running W10 pro with an SSD and an older Acer laptop with a traditional drive, so not a like for like comparison by any means but the differences are startling.
The Dell fully boots in 11 seconds, the Acer around 1.5 to 2 minutes.
Opening something like LibreOffice takes a couple of seconds on the Dell, around 30 seconds or more on the Acer.
A full image backup takes 2.5 minutes on the Dell, around 35 minutes on the Acer (both are set up pretty much identically, and if anything the Acer will have less to back up).
And so it goes on...
Shutdown takes around 4 seconds on the Dell, anything up to 30 seconds or more on the Acer.
I do remember that fitting the SSD was the single biggest performance gain I have ever seen, forget extra RAM and tweaking things to improve speed. Everything was just lightning fast after going SSD.
I am sure anyone reading this who has also fitted an SSD will confirm what a massive difference it makes.
Thanks I think I've got the picture now so will go for the SSD and see what happens, also it sounds the easiest route as I'm not too keen on the idea of a complete re-install. Still it's there in the background in case.
Again many thanks for all your great help as I'd had no idea to start with !
If you go down the SSD route it means you can remove your present HDD and preserve the original installation. Assuming the SSD install goes to plan (hey, why wouldn't it :)) then you have a spare drive that you could put in a USB caddy to make an external drive for saving stuff to (and that would be just like those you buy at Argos).
As a first step I would ask yourself how much space you actually need.
Music and particularly videos are the big consumers. Windows itself doesn't occupy all that much room. I manage very nicely with a 256Gb drive and other than needing to cater for my rather extreme backup plans I could easily manage with a 128Gb drive.
For me 30Gb covers Windows and 100's of photos, quite a lot of specialised programs and files and 100's of PDF's. No videos though although I do have around 100 CD's ripped as Windows Media Audio (WMA) files.
I can confirm this(previous post from Mooly). For just normal office tasks like documents and other similar, a 128GB drive is enough. I have 128GB on one laptop, which is more than enough. On the other I have 500GB, but only because I am a programmer,so my disk space needs can be huge from time to time. All extra stuff I store on external drives.
In your case that 500GB original spinner would serve very well for this purpose, if you stick it in an USB enclosure. I did exactly this on my other laptop when I upgraded the 750GB HDD to a 500GB SSD. I also did exactly as described above, I just removed the original drive, and put in the ssd, then I clean installed Windows. Once my system was up and running I transferred documents from the original HDD via USB. At this point I did not remove the original content from my HDD. Once I was certain I had backed up all I wanted to keep, I wiped the whole original HDD. :)
Aside from my Lenovo I've still got my original old Win 7 which I keep up to date just in case of any problems with Lenovo, meanwhile using it primarily as storage for piano keyboard practice as it has a lot of music stored on MP4 files. However I keep important things in a Cloud account which I keep up to date as a back up having lost a USB once though fortunately there was nothing important on it.
This is why I think the SSD speed up suggestion could be ideal and then see how things turn out as space isn't a top priority. :)
I'm personally of the opinion 4gig of RAM for Windows 10 is pretty minimal. Anyway it seems a few things were missed here when this image was posted by the OP...
1) The above appears to have not been updated since it's still showing 2016 instead of 2017 that shows with the Anniversary and Creator updates. A fully patched Windows 10 will have a date of 2017, not 2016...
Windows 10, version 1703. Build 15063.502
2) And for a 64-bit OS, as I said, 4 gig of RAM is pretty minimum. If you want to OS to fly, you really need to up the memory to at least 8 gig (if possible).
On my 2013 Asus Zenbook Prime notebook, I had to ultimately replace it because it's non-upgradable 4gig of RAM was killing it performance wise, especially where Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom were concerned.
3) Add that the OP is running an i3 processor and you just have a slow notebook.
Also, once the initial use of an SSD drive is used, it tends to slow due to garbage collection/Trim cycles in cleaning up data that was written and then ultimately deleted. This is done so that the used space is recovered for later data use.
All these factors conspire to slow an already slowed system down.
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