Slow laptops

David Adler

David Adler

David Adler

Associate
Joined
14 Sep 2020
Posts
4
Hi

I've bought laptops for my wife and children a while ago and am struggling to understand why they seem slow in general use compared to my own ancient Intel I3 gen 1 laptop. I have done the usual checks:
- cpu usage checking for anything taking a lot of cpu
- checking what is in the start up menu and disabling anything superfluous
- chkdsk
- defrag
- using a different browser
- deleting various internet files and unused files on the c drive

My own laptop is a gen 1 I3 with 8 gb of ram. My wife's laptop is a 4th gen I5 with 16gb of ram yet seems to be a lot slower whatever the task. I really can't fathom what else to try. E.g. we both use Microsoft Edge to browse the internet but the response times for my laptop seem faster. We have two wifi setups but it makes no difference which we use. The laptops just need to be able to browse the internet and create documents, no gaming.
Thanks in advance
 
What's the storage, HDD or SSD? It's worth using Task Manager's Performance tab to see where the bottleneck is.

My wife's old HP was dreadful as it only had 4GB of RAM and a 1 TB HDD that was as lively as an elderly snail on Mogadon, permanently at 100% usage.
 
Hi

All four laptops are on ssds and Windows 10. I did look at the performance tab but nothing stood out. My son's laptop did show high cpu but nothing was hogging the processor.
 
That's not normal for certain. Although it is odd that task manager isn't showing the process using all the CPU.

It should be noted that the AMD A6 CPU in that laptop is probably similar or even less powerful than your 1st-gen i3! But still that shouldn't make it slow.

The easy fix would be a clean install of Windows, you can use 'Reset this PC' which I believe gives you the option to keep your files and just refreshes windows.

Other option is digging into what is using the CPU with something like Process Explorer.
 
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