SOLVED Clean up my Laptop

[powrus]

I've got a 6 year old laptop used primarily when I travel. A Win7 machine that was upgraded to a Win10 a couple of years ago this laptop continues to serve me well .... to a point. It's convenient to be able to pay bills and or keep updated records while I'm away from home with this laptop. Record keeping is done with MS Office Home and Student 2007- and an external hard drive allows me to keep backups and to transfer info back to my office PC when returning home. Other programs loaded on this unit could easily be replaced.

My question [problem] is this laptop takes several minutes to restart and I can hear the buzzing as it labors to take care of business prior to reopening. I have attempted to harness various startup tasks and I dutifully use the disk cleanup provided by Win10 but it seems as though a serious cleanup of 6 years of use is in order. I believe this machine would work great if it were wiped clean. A fresh start.

That said, as a novice at best, I'm uncertain of how to do that step by step. Also, I would probably lose my MS Office 2007 which still works for me here. I could purchase a newer version of MS Office but then there's that cost I'm trying to delay as long as possible, My office PC uses MS Office 2016 but that version is dedicated to that single PC.

Am I overthinking the cleanup options? Are there other steps to take before wiping this laptop clean?

 

[Clintlgm]

If you have completed Disk Clean up and system clean up. You can run Some DISM tools to further repair your windows install. Run these tools one at a time and allow them to complete some could that several hours to complete if you have a lot of corruption to repair. In your search box type CMD, right-click the result cmd.exe and select run as administrator. copy and past each tool and let them run. the SFC /scannow you need to run at least 3 times, You could run that one first but if you have a lot of corruption it may not finish successfully without doing the other repairs first.
Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth
Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth
Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup
SFC /scannow
chkdsk C: /f

Another thought is your hard drive could be failing?
When was the last time you opened up the notebook and blew out all the dust this would account for noise as fans don't do well covered in dust.

 

[powrus]

[QUOTE="Clintlgm, post: 94317 Another thought is your hard drive could be failing?
When was the last time you opened up the notebook and blew out all the dust this would account for noise as fans don't do well covered in dust.[/QUOTE]
Thank you for your reply. I will try those things. Currently, I'm doing a full scan which caught me off guard when it tells me I've got 2 hrs remaining for that scan to complete. We'll see.

 

[Clintlgm]

Yes seems you windows has many errors to repair. Did you also test your hard drive for failure status? you can download a Diag. Tool from the manufactures website. It won't do you any good to fix your windows if your hard drive is losing sectors

 

[powrus]

Huge difference with the operation of my laptop following the deletion of many gigabytes of random files. This is only the beginning of my allowing this unit to work more efficiently.
Thanks for the support and the information provided me.

 

[MrEd]

I believe a very worthwhile activity is to replace the internal HDD with a SSD (the head-crash goes but the head-bang continues!!).
Replacement is very easy to do, both physically and with the software (clone) transfer.