SOLVED Windows 10 laptop response is very slow

[WesternGuy]

My wife's laptop running Win 10 Home edition (update 1809) has started to slow down considerably. For example, on startup the time for this to happen is measured in tens of seconds instead of small amount of seconds. Invoking Task Manager (CTRL, ALT, DELETE) takes many tens of seconds instead of being almost instantaneous. The same is true of the Firefox web browser.

Both Malware and Norton are running on this computer and are updated to whatever the current version is.

I have a similar laptop (ASUS) that is configured similarly - Win 10 Home 1809, etc. In fact, it has more large programs on it (Photoshop, Lightroom, etc.) than hers does and still runs very efficiently and boots up in seconds compared to hers which can take in the order of tens of seconds.

I have run CCleaner Pro (latest edition) and checked all disk partitions to ensure they are not getting full and still this "slowness" persists. She says that it has been getting worse over the past week or so, and was particularly bad yesterday (Sat. March 28) and is no better today than it was yesterday.
I have tried just about everything I know (and that isn't much) and nothing seems to be helping. Also, I have found no way to identify what the possible problem is.

I am looking for ideas about things to try in an attempt to resolve this situation or identify the problem. Any insight that anyone would care to provide will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

WesternGuy

 

[Tim Locke]

Personally I would not allow any software by Norton ( or McAfee for that matter) on any computer I owned.

Windows Defender and a weekly run of Malwarebytes does the job. IIRC once you have Norton installed it needs a specail program downloaded from their website to fully remove it.

Other things to look at.
Has her machine got an HDD rather than an SSD. If so has it been defragged? Have you done a CHKdsk?
Do she have many, many icons on the screen, like 50 or so, icons for individual documents. Windows historically hates that.

 

[WesternGuy]

Well, Tim, I guess we have a slight difference of opinion. I have had Norton/Symantec's ant-virus, etc., software on my computers for over 30 years and have never had any problems, at all. The one exception was another 3rd party app which came with the computer - the good old days when things like that happened - and it caused me quite a bit of grief. I got rid of it and replaced it with Norton and never had any grief again.

Funny thing happened, my wife was frustrated with her computer this afternoon and turned it off. When she restarted it, it started to install something on her machine. It turned out to be an upgrade (1909) to Windows. This seems to have resolved whatever issues were causing problems before.

I consider this issue closed.

WesternGuy