Laptop continually slows to a crawl

Hi, first check your WEI score just for interest, using this great free tweak tool (with full explanations):


Next check your disk: get a copy of Hard Disk Sentinel (portable version available) - result right on its GUI. Green is good.

When I first loaded Windows 10 it would boot up in about 1.5/2 minutes if I recall, now it can take up to 15 mins.

Is that consistently that slow, and is that with or without Fast Startup?

Slow boot analysis is technically demanding- use Windows Performance Analayser and Recorder (free from MS).
Presents graphically exactly what is taking time.
Examples with screenshots in various threads on tenforums- just search for
Windows Performance Analayser and Recorder
slow boot
etc

Please boot up, log in, wait about 4 minutes, launch no additional programs.
Post a screenshot of your task manager showing resource use with columns appropriately organised high to low.

30Gb is a bit low- that's the minimum for a major feature update (upgrade) for example, noting Windows.old is created and requires a lot of space.

Similarly post a screenshot of your task manager when it is behaving slowly.

You should check that sevices are set to default (tutorial available to do that).

A few people find their hard disk maxes out at 100% usage when the maximum transfer rate is, say, around 10MB/s.
That can slow everything down.

It's almost certainly a slow hd often 5400 rpm get a SSD I did with my hp and now flys

Having a HDD alone wouldn't cause this:

boot up in about 1.5/2 minutes if I recall, now ican take up to 15 mins.

But agreed, people have taken the approach of doing what you say rather than fixing the problem...

pewe said:

I have a 7 year old HP Envy I7 laptop.
When I first loaded Windows 10 it would boot up in about 1.5/2 minutes if I recall, now it can take up to 15 mins.

Also. for a while now the laptop suddenly slows to a painful speed, for example, the other day it took 4/5 minutes (yes that is correct) to change from one tab in chrome to another, and just as long for a different program to become active - for example if I wanted to switch from Chrome to Thunderbird.

If I reboot, the transfer between programs is almost instantaneous again, but after a while, it slows down again.

I wonder if the problem is due to disc space - or something else.

Any suggestions about resolving this would be appreciated.

It can be due to file corruption
Open a CMD window as administrator and type:
chkdsk c: /f
It will say your disk is in use and ask if you want to schedule to next start = yes
Restart
Pay attention on the results, specially bad blocks, bad clusters, bad sectors etc

Back to Windows, open a CMD window as administrator and type:
sfc /scannow

If it finds any corrupted files, fixing or not, reboot and run again

then run

Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth
and
Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

Also use Autoruns to check what third party stuff is loading and disable inessential items https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sys...loads/autoruns

Installing a SSD will greatly improve the speed.

Howver, that doesn't address boot times..

And we have no further evidence from pewe as to what's going on when it is slow.. not even a screenshot of the task manager...

With 12Gb RAM, the number of startups is hopefully not significant, and even if paging parameters had been changed that might not have a huge effect.