Poor performance with more than capable laptop

so. my laptop specs.

i5 6200U
4Gb ram
940M GPU
1 Tb Seagate 5400RPM HDD
i have disabled Windows search, just minutes ago disabled superfetch. Have defragged HDD and i even freshly installed Windows month ago and short stroked to 150Gb for windows(primary installation partition) and secondary is aprox 850Gb for data. 850 Gb is made for games and software i work with.

i still have kinda poor performance. i think my laptop is more than capable for windows 10 becouse i ran Ubuntu 16.04 X64 with Unity(which is heavy on resources) user interface.

How do i improve my pc performance? How do i improve my HDD performance? And can i change the Windows 10 UI? i think it is too big. i am allready using small taskbar check box but taskbar is still too big and X button on top of file explorer and windows 10 apps are too big. i wat to change them to smaller versions. Even poor windows 8.1 UI was better.

Hardware wise.....add more RAM and add a SSD.

dalchina said:

Hi, those are good fundamental ideas (SSD- if you have the option of adding a second drive- not all laptops can accommodate them).

Unless there is a file or disk problem that will achieve nothing. Windows search backs off if there is just a little user or program activity and imposes no noticeable overhead, unless there is a problem that needs fixing. That idea goes back to XP.

Defragmentation is looked after routinely by Windows. Again should not be a problem these days.

Have a look at your task manager. What is the CPU disk and network use when idle? Hopefully all are near 0.
Check again when you perceive performance is slow. Check too the Performance tab in your task manager.

Are your page file settings left as default? Or have you changed them?

Check your disk - Hard Disk Sentinel (trial).
From an admin command prompt run
chkdsk C: /scan
and report the results (repeat for any other partition or disk)

Having done the above and checked your RAM is not being mostly used, your page file and pool usage is low - an indication of problems here would also be high disk usage as your laptop struggles to move things in and out of RAM because there isn't enough RAM)- and your CPU use is not unreasonable, if you still have problems, please define 'slow' and compare performance
a. in Safe Mode
b. after a clean boot

I have changed page file settings, increased it to maximum 8256 and initial to 6512.

CPU and RAM are close to 0 when idle but disk still has usage.
as one user in this thread said i should get SSD. i will never buy an SSD. only second hard drive(second hdd case in side of laptop.CD-ROm is sitting there right now) SSD'ies die fast and cant be reformated and changed vary often. I change OS'es often(once 3-6 months clean installs)

i manage to see HDD as more superior. it's lifespan is much longer, capacities are larger per dollar. they are cheaper.

Add more RAM to 8 GB minimum. This is the single most useful hardware addition.
My Laptop hardware is almost identical but from 2 years previous in hardware terms(i5-4200M).

SSDs are expensive, personally I would rather have the extra room of a 1 TB HDD at a fraction of the cost.
You are right about the cost, but wrong about the longevity at least on recent/modern SSDs.

No idea what criteria you are using for 'speed'. Nothing you have done will make any difference whatsoever, may actually be detrimental. Windows will manage your Page File better than you can.
That is one of the reasons to increase the RAM to minimise use of the HDD as a Page File.

There is no need to keep installing Windows 10, my install is 4 years old, obviously now with Windows 10 it is effectively done on a version update every 6 months anyway.

You seem to be randomly guessing some one factor is the cause, it may well not be.

I would go through all your Windows 10 settings, there are around 100 that need looking at, that is relatively quick despite the number.

Then after that look at Task Manager objectively to find out what is using the HDD. It maybe some scheduled maintenance task or something else. You maybe can move that to hours when you are not using it.

Some types of applications users install can also use the HDD a lot, run rubbish in the background, etc that you will have to look at.

My cousin had bought one like that several years ago and once I removed the Factory Bloatware it had much improved performance.

I did a check and it looks like the laptop has a place to mount a caddy and install a second drive. Looking at YouTube Vids removing the back cover is something you might not want to do more than once, so I'd suggest getting the RAM, SSD and a caddy for a second drive to install all at the same time.

On My laptop I leave the mechanical in the stock location then multi-boot Win 7,8.1 and 10 using small 120-240GB SSDs in the caddy. The stock drive is a clone of My Win 8.1 daily driver and partitioned for storage. These days SSDs will last far longer than any mechanical drive.