terribly slow laptop

willhub · 26 May 2019 at 11:32

Hi

Trying to get this old Pavilion G6 up to scratch.

I've never experienced a laptop this slow but it surely must be a problem? It's running on a mechanical hard drive but even still.

Windows 10 is super slow and loads onto a black screen for about 5 mins, also I have re installed Windows and it's painfully slow still.

It's got 8gb ram and an i3 3110M

Surely it should be able to be a smooth experience in Windows and load web browsers fine because even that's painfully slow

Any ideas?

Armageus · 26 May 2019 at 11:36

Replace the hard drive with an SSD - even old core2duo laptops are still useable for general browsing etc as long as they have an SSD.

Only other thing to consider is taking the bottom off and blowing any dust out of the heatsink, as if the CPU gets too hot it could throttle.

willhub · 26 May 2019 at 11:42

It's running at 2.4 which its rated for.

I'm a bit averse to getting an SSD at the moment as surely it should be snappy for these basic tasks without an SSD? I'm sure my old C2D laptop was faster than this even with 4gb ram and its HDD, same with my older quad core X3350 desktop with a HDD in fact that was snappy in windows for sure!

Armageus · 26 May 2019 at 11:52

HPs home machines e.g. Pavilions are very much built to a price point (unlike HP business machines), so likely a poor performing slow hard drive to begin with (that may have got worse over time if it has a few minor errors etc).

Stick a cheap SSD in it and I reckon it will be a completely different machine

willhub · 26 May 2019 at 13:57

Saying that your suspicions may be right, just install the latest Windows 10 upgrade and well.. on my laptop it took less than 10 mins, on this one I've gone gone to town, had a wetherspoons meal come back and it's only at 30% !

wedrum · 26 May 2019 at 13:59

Wipe it and start again see of any improvements.

Then adding a cheap ssd is a good boost too.

an0nym0us · 2 Jun 2019 at 08:13

Totally agree with the past comments. The original HDD is likely to have deteriorated in performance significantly. Even swapping it for another working HDD is likely to yield improvements. But changing to a cheap SSD would offer the best jumps in performance.