will a SSD solve my problems?

Fantail said:

Well before you upgrade to an ssd it would appear your laptop hasn't any breathing room on the drive. You didn't mention the current drive size so I'll just say probably double it for the ssd. Presuming you get an ssd, you can then do a clean OS install, or ghost / clone your current OS. If you go that route it's time to uninstall anything not necessary and do a disk cleanup. An ssd certainly breaths new life into any pc / laptop without one.

My disk is like 40% free. I have 187 of 445 gb free.

hsehestedt said:

@ironfist, in general terms I'm going to agree with Fantail on this one, but there are a few things that you can do to ensure success.
I would suggest pressing ALT + CTRL +DEL and then choosing task manager. Go to the performance tab. Monitor both your memory usage and disk utilization, especially when things get particularly slow. You want to make sure that you are not simply starving your system of memory and that the bottleneck is indeed the disk.

When things get slow, it's usually Firefox, or System, or SystemHost: SysMain. I close Firefox and sometimes it speeds up, but then it slows down again.

If you are NOT pegging your memory usage but you DO see extremely high Active time and very slow Average response times on your disk, then you have a prime candidate for improving performance with an SSD.

Can you explain what you mean by "active time?"

Just from personal experience; I have an old laptop (guessing about 7 or 8 years old) where I replaced the HD with an SSD. That made a huge difference for me. The system is still no speed demon, but it helped a lot.

I think that's about the age of my computer.

Another tip: If your laptop has an optical drive, you can also replace the optical drive with a HD. On my system, I replaced the physical HD with an SSD, making the SSD my boot device. I replaced the optical drive with a caddy designed specifically to fit in place of an optical drive. I put the original HD in that caddy. So now I have the speed of an SSD for the boot disk and an extra HD where I can store lots of large files.

It does!

ignatzatsonic said:

Do you mean that your CPU is a 3630QM, not a 360QM??

Yes.

The 3630QM is 8 year old technology; quad core; Passmark rating 5109; single thread Passmark rating 1670;

I don't know exactly what kind of load you are putting on the CPU, but it is no longer an upper level CPU, i7 or not.

Was it EVER significantly faster (in years past) when you asked it to do the same things you are asking it to do today?

Yup. It was really fast.

Offhand, I'd guess you would be disappointed if you expected a major difference in performance with an SSD, other than in boot speed and to some extent in loading applications or doing disk intensive stuff like virus scans or backing up a bunch of files.

You need to confirm you have no hardware issues and no runaway processes or services.

How do I confirm this?

HeM said:

If I were you, I'd clean install Win10, getting rid of all garbage which has made my PC slow.
What you describe is not normal and some expert members here can guide you to fix all your issues.

I am planning on doing that. I have a different laptop (even slower) that I'm going to try it on first.

Really old PCs, having much older hardware than yours, are not behaving like yours. Your problem is not the HDD and of course an SSD should give wings to your PC given that you'll perform a clean install.

On your current HDD, you can try a Reset means you loose all apps, or a Repair Install Windows 10 with an In-place Upgrade keeping all your apps, means garbage too..., or a clean install means you start from the beggining which is the best solution.

Based on what I've heard this might be the proper solution.

Of course, you may wait for a few days when new Win 10 (v.2004) will be released and perform an upgrade which might help or a clean install which will help for sure. Buying a new PC is not a good idea. It's like you buy a new car because of bad spark plugs of your current.

Puzzling.

Another idea, while you're waiting (if so) for Win 10 new release, is to open Task manager, go to Startup tab, disable all items you don't want to run when computer starts and restart to see if that helps. And of course, uninstall software you don't need, especially Antivirus (if you have more than one), games etc. Those are some of the many things you can do about your slow PC...

I have. I have only a few things left running.

Steve C said:

Installing an SSD will make a huge speed difference. You might be able to keep the old HDD installed as a backup drive if you have a spare drive bay in your laptop - else you can buy a cheap USB SATA disk caddy and use it as an external drive.

I would use Macrium Reflect to image your current installation to and external drive, install the SSD then boot to the Reflect USB recovery drive and recover the backup image to the SSD. You might want to consider a clean install at that point if you are remain unhappy with the performance.

Maybe that will work.

dalchina said:

Hi, not seen your task manager yet.



I think some have assumed you mean your disk is full.. perhaps you mean usage is 100%.

It sounds as if yours is a CPU and disk usage problem- upgrading to a SSD will not solve whatever is wrong in your system configuration, assuming your current disk is ok.

Please post screenshots of your task manager showing resource usage, arranging columns of interest high to low by clicking the appropriate column header.

a. When your PC is supposedly nominally idle- say 3-4 minutes after logging in, no other programs launched.

b. Perform a clean boot (Google if unsure how or see tutorial)
Repeat screenshots of your task manager.

Also please install and run HD Tune v2.55 (free) and post the Health tab - does it look ok?

How much free space do you have on C: ?

Tell me about this HD Tune. Will post screenshots.

Lottiemansion said:

Hi,

I might be barking up the wrong tree here, but do you login to a MS account or are you using a local one? I know that Windows10 runs slow if you do not "Occationally" login to a verified account.

Therefore, if your on a local account, I suggest you login & verify your MS account on the PC & it should speed back up?

Local. wtf, Windows slows down if you don't use an internet account?

Helmut said:

"and it won't even let me defrag it. "
Your basic problem is lack of HDD space. You have too much installed.
You should have a minimum of 20% free disc space for temporary files and for doing things like Defrag.

So when you buy a new drive it does not matter whether it is an SSD or HDD it has to be large enough. That is a very basic point, and then be in a position of not continuously worrying about that 20% of spare space.

"Everyone on the internet says SDDs handle all your problems"
That is nonsense as there is not even the basic consideration about Drive size, and in part the amount of RAM (lack of RAM means more swops to HDD/SSD, RAM is faster than SSD).

Assuming an a large enough drive, the only difference you will notice with an SSD is shorter loading times of an Application and slightly faster bootup time. Unless there is a lot of reading/writing to the Disc you won't see any difference.

Going back to April you asked the same question but still we do not know the basics of how full your HDD is. The numbers you gave then do not seem to add up.

Barely anything is installed, legitimately.

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Jacee said:

How often do you clean 'temps", and have you ever cleaned the dust out of your computer?

So I didn't, until recently, I deleted a few gigs of temps. Took forever. I had to google "computer frozen on cleanup" and it was a choice because it's a normal problem. But it completed.

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dalchina said:

I suspect, as I said, Ironfist (who hasn't responded at all) isn't talking about a 100% full disk (sotrage capacity), but that disk activity is using 100% of available disk transfer rate..



The wording of the post is somewhat imprecise.

This is true, 100% Disk usage, not disk storage.

RoadBlaster said:

100% disk usage could be a sign that the hard drive is on its way out anyway as data rates could be shrinking & any hard drive which is over 50% to 75% full can slow down considerably including SSD'S, so double the size of hard drive you have now in SSD would be good - it would still be 10 times faster with no mechanical lagging

It's about 50% full.

dalchina said:

HD Tune v2.55 free - check before taking action.

Still awaiting any sort of reply though.. assume nothing. Test everything.

Is this a decent program to use? It's not like a ransomware or something right?

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This is a video of my computer taking 5 minutes to boot:

YouTube
I have another one where it takes a few minutes just to have the password screen appear when I hit a button.

You asked that I explain what I mean by "Active time" so here goes:

In Task Manager, when you go to the performance tab and look at the disk information, you will specifically see a section labeled "Active time". This indicates the percentage of time that the drive is actively reading or writing data. If the disk is busy nearly 100% of the time, it's an indication of heavy disk activity.

The bottom line of what everyone here is saying is this:

We need to determine what resources are responsible for the slow performance. Is it CPU, memory, disk drive? If your disk drive is hardly being touched, then replacing it may not make much sense. If it getting slammed, then an SSD will very likely help.

hsehestedt said:

You asked that I explain what I mean by "Active time" so here goes:

In Task Manager, when you go to the performance tab and look at the disk information, you will specifically see a section labeled "Active time". This indicates the percentage of time that the drive is actively reading or writing data. If the disk is busy nearly 100% of the time, it's an indication of heavy disk activity.

The bottom line of what everyone here is saying is this:

We need to determine what resources are responsible for the slow performance. Is it CPU, memory, disk drive? If your disk drive is hardly being touched, then replacing it may not make much sense. If it getting slammed, then an SSD will very likely help.

Look, you're saying, while the computer is being slow, check and see what active time is?

Yes.

Active time is 100% when it is being slow so far.

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Active time seems to be the same as the number in the Disk tab. They change connected.

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I got 16gigs of RAM today. Right now I'm running at 7.5gigs while only having Firefox, task manager, and Fireworks open however I just closed Fireworks and now we're at 7.4gigs so I guess it wasn't doing much.

7 gigs just to do normal stuff. No wonder my old 6gigs wasn't doing anything, but, I still don't know why I never had this issue previously. More and more likely I'm starting to think Firefox is the problem.

On a separate laptop, I removed most of the Windows Apps with Powershell, turned off OneDrive, etc., and it didn't make much difference. That computer is an i3 with 4gigabytes of memory which is not replaceable, but it used to be so fast. I thought maybe deleting some programs would work, the apps I never use (most of them), but it doesn't seem to. OneDrive seems to constantly be running, I don't use it, so I prevented it from running at startup. I was going to do the same on this computer but am uncertain if it would do anything. I sparsely have anything loaded to run at startup, however, look: