VAIO PC excruciatingly slow for unknown reason

Hi,

I'm primarily a Mac person, coming back to windows on this PC cause its the only one in the house with an optical drive. Last windows OS I used was XP, and I'm totally lost in 10.

As I understand (I am not the primary user of this computer) the OS has recently been freshly installed. This computer has barely been used as the slowness has relegated it to a back cabinet. I have stopped everything I can think of from running or starting that I don't need, and still can't run two apps at once. Importing a CD with iTunes? Can't do a web search without it freezing. Looking at settings? Go grab a cup of coffee while the menu loads. The specs on this PC seem to be acceptable--an i7 intel processor with 4gb of ram--I'm having a hard time understanding why it is so impossibly slow.

My Mac, for comparison, has an intel i5 processor and 4gb of ram and is running Catalina with absolutely no issues, very little load time or delay for any task.

So what's different? Unknown

Windows version is 1903 OS build 18362.476 (updated a week or so ago.)

Thanks!

4 GB of RAM is acceptable.

However, there are some weak i7s out there, such as yours.

Don't know what i5 you have in your Mac, but it may be much stronger than this i7.

Over 9 years old, socket 988, Passmark score 3191; single thread score 917.

Puny by anywhere near recent standards. Probably has a 5400 rpm hard drive.

Not sure what your expectations were. I guess you had not used it before?

Offhand, I'd guess Win 10 has little to do with it---it typically runs as well on given hardware as Win 7.

You could take a gander at Task Manager (processes, CPU, disk activity) to see if there is anything outlandish going on in there. I wouldn't be surprised to see disk activity and CPU usage to be quite high when it seems particularly slow.

Do you have any reason to believe it doesn't perform as well now as it ever has?

jajaamanda said:

...I don't even know when this computer was manufactured....

The manuals on the Sony support site are dated 2009/2010...

Manuals for VPCF121GX | Sony USA

...since Sony doesn't make VAIO anymore (or computers)...

...the most recent download on the Downloads page in the above link is for W10 32/64 bit and dated 2019, so they still seem to support them...

...I couldn't find any specs on it...

Here you go: Download - Sony VPCF121GX Specification Guide | Manualsbrain.com

Did you do a check disk? A problematic disk can slow down everything.

First thing I usually check is the Task Manager, there are processes in there that will slow down your computer almost to a halt. Post a screenshot of your task manager here in the processes tab and click on the Disk tab to display the processes that has the highest activity on top.

That i7 isn't the fastest anymore but should still be fine for day-to-day usage. 4GB ram is only barely manageable with the current amount of bloat Windows 10 has now.

Hi there

@jajaamanda

I've got an Old Sony VAIO with a PENTIUM IV processor in it --- runs W10 OK -- although huge power consumption of the old PENTIUM IV and the graphics !!!! compared to modern laptops.

Simply swap HDD with an SSD - and it should fly.

(Image old HDD with Macrium Free and restore to new SSD. Use SATA-->USB adapter to attach SSD to computer -- my Sony only had USB2 slots so won't be the fastest transfer. Create a bootable USB stick via RUFUS so you can use the bootable restore from Macrium to restore your image. If the SSD is bigger than old HDD just CLONE the old one with Macrium, replace old HDD with SSD and boot.

Cheers
jimbo

I have an old Vaio laptop that was given to me from a friend who bought it new back in 2006 I think. It was also very very slow. I installed a new SSD this past Sunday. I cloned the HDD to the SSD. That Vaio is so much faster now. It's amazing that just upgrading the HDD to an SSD would make it so much faster. But it did.

ram1220 said:

I have an old Vaio laptop that was given to me from a friend who bought it new back in 2006 I think. It was also very very slow. I installed a new SSD this past Sunday. I cloned the HDD to the SSD. That Vaio is so much faster now. It's amazing that just upgrading the HDD to an SSD would make it so much faster. But it did.

Hi there
I've often remarked in posts when people were thinking about getting more RAM / upgrading CPU's etc on their computers is that the most forgotten element and usually the one that causes most of the bottlenecks are SLOW HDD's especially those with 5400 RPM and tiny cache sizes.

Replacing by an SSD will invariably yield quite considerable performance -- especially believe it or not -- on OLDER machines.

RAM is only important if you have loads of users (not usually normal on a single user home machine / laptop), you want to run a load of VM's or you haven't got enough for running a load of concurrent applications. Otherwise even 4GB is perfectly OK for most Windows 10 applications.

Cheers
jimbo