UKC

My computer went into a local shop to be repaired (twice) as the power button broke and then having fixed that suddenly the computer wouldn't charge - the connection from the power input to the rest of the computer had then become damaged, apparently unrelated to the previous repair. Anyway since returning from these repairs it has become intolerably slow, no new programs or anything like that have been installed. it is a 3 year old laptop running windows 7. Please can anyone help or advise me how to improve it performance or what has caused its sudden decline! sadly I can not afford an upgrade at the moment! thanks

In reply to monkey man:
So it's definitely since the repairs? Tricky.

Otherwise I 'd suggest the usual things... Defrag, more RAM, get an SSD, wipe it and start again, or better still, just get rid of windows all together.

In reply to Jonny2vests:

Yes have done a defrag and virus scan and basics I can think of!

In reply to monkey man:

Try ccleaner. The registry cleaner on that (needs to be done multiple times until nothing shows) can often speed things up a lot. It's free too (plus it has other useful utilities).

In reply to monkey man: Another so-obvious-it's-easy-to-overlook suggestion: are the fans clean and clear of dust and other gunk?

A fan that's not able to work properly can cause even the speediest PC to become arthritic.

T.

In reply to monkey man:

Back up you stuff on a usb stick or external HDD then find out how to do a factory reset on your laptop, often the restore files are on a hidden partition on the hard drive and to get access to it, it is often a boot up key combo, ALT + F11 for example. Make and model? I'll post details if you cant find the combo for your machine

In reply to monkey man:

I always wipe the f^cker and start again rather than fiddling. Never gets back to its original "glory" but you can another year or so of use out I find.

In reply to monkey man:

From the start button click run and type in msconfig. Click the startup tab and disable all the useless programs that are being loaded in the background when you start the computer (adobe, MS office etc etc). It's worth doing periodocally becase, as programs up date themselves they reset themselves to run at start-up.

Also check your antivirus isn't slowing everything down.

You can also try opening Windows in Safe Mode and see how fast it is.

In reply to monkey man:

Could try unscrewing the RAM panel at the back and take the RAM out and then re-seat it, just incase they were heavy handed with it and slightly dislodged one of the sticks.

Otherwise the standard format/reinstall win7 should fix any problems.

In reply to monkey man:

Yeah, good point ^^^^. This happened to me last week.

In reply to crayefish:

Cheers for that Fish & lazzaw!

Just tried both those and my machine is noticeably quicker.

In reply to monkey man:

Stick Linux on it and forget about things slowing down.

If you absolutely *must* run Windows programs then a virtual machine like Virtualbox will run things just as well.

ALC