Slow laptop

[Harry Wilkes]

Good Evening
Hoping someone can help restore my sanity I have a Sony Vario laptop see attached pic it came with a 1TB HD and for sometime it's been very slow and I mean slow so last week due to hospital visit I need need to isolate so i made a start on it firstly i down loaded software to check the memory which was OK next having backed up I did a clean install of windows 10 had a few problem with the install but third time it install OK. When I started to reinstall my progs etc I noted it was still slow i then gave up for the moment and I'm looking for some help as to what the problem might be ?
Thanks
H

 

[Tim Locke]

A friend has an HP laptop that is running very slowly for no reason I can see. Haven't yet tried a reload of Windows.
It has a 1TB spinner and I am thinking of Chkdsk next.

 

[Harry Wilkes]

A friend has an HP laptop that is running very slowly for no reason I can see. Haven't yet tried a reload of Windows.
It has a 1TB spinner and I am thinking of Chkdsk next.

Thanks haven't tried that will give it a go
H

 

[ubuysa]

HDDs are almost always the main case of slow computers because of their long seek and latency times. Only having 8GB of RAM may not be helping either, if your RAM pages you'll be writing to that slow HDD which will REALLY make the system slow.

Running chkdsk on that drive is an excellent idea. Also ensure that the drive is not too full, HDDs in particular perform poorly when they're more than about 70% full. Run the Windows Disk Cleanup tool to remove all garbage and then defrag the drive. The long-term solution is to replace that HDD with an SSD.

 

[Harry Wilkes]

HDDs are almost always the main case of slow computers because of their long seek and latency times. Only having 8GB of RAM may not be helping either, if your RAM pages you'll be writing to that slow HDD which will REALLY make the system slow.

Running chkdsk on that drive is an excellent idea. Also ensure that the drive is not too full, HDDs in particular perform poorly when they're more than about 70% full. Run the Windows Disk Cleanup tool to remove all garbage and then defrag the drive. The long-term solution is to replace that HDD with an SSD.

Thanks for your reply the drive only got win 10 files on it
H

 

[ubuysa]

Thanks for your reply the drive only got win 10 files on it
H

Then I'd check the drive itself, first with chkdsk and then with a (free) HDD benchmarking tool, like CrystalDiskMark.

 

[Harry Wilkes]

Thanks for your input Ive run chkdsk and it reported no problems will try the option you have suggested
Thanks
H

 

[Tim Locke]

Does chkdsk replace bad sectors?

Old (pre windows) systems would replace bad sectors over at the far end of the drive causing a couple of long head movements. This really noticed on old disks (talking the old pre sata 5" disks or even older)

A lot of replaced sectors would noticeably slow up a spinner because of this.

 

[ubuysa]

Does chkdsk replace bad sectors?

Old (pre windows) systems would replace bad sectors over at the far end of the drive causing a couple of long head movements. This really noticed on old disks (talking the old pre sata 5" disks or even older)

A lot of replaced sectors would noticeably slow up a spinner because of this.

It does if you use the /R switch, so a chksdsk /x /r will replace bad sectors (the /X switch unmounts the drive first - which is necessary).

Spare sectors are in the centre of the drive, so using these does result in longer seek times. There's no such thing as a free lunch!

 

[Tim Locke]

OK SO the technology has improved if the replacements are now in the centre of the drive not the far edge! None of my computers have spinners any more but I will do the /r /x on my friends laptop.