Windows 7 slowing down to a standstill

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rolls_rapide

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Basically, since about August/September, I've experienced the laptop running slow for no good reason. I used Chrome, Avast! free antivirus, and Windows firewall.

It eventually got to the stage of taking minutes to boot (stuck on the Welcome screen), black/blank screen, refusal to load Task Manager, booted out of Task Manager, and just freezing for minutes at a time. Network wifi connection took forever all of a sudden. When Task Manager did load, the memory was maxed out.

I can't be sure, but it seems to have coincided with updates to Chrome and Avast.

Anyway, it got to the point of me pressing and holding the power button, and on reboot, to be met with the blue screen of death, with something about the Registry (hive) being corrupted.

I ran the usual Chkdsk got it back to fit state, ran the system file checker, ran another chkdsk - and discovered a faulty file with Avast.

I uninstalled Avast, reinstalled it but the computer still ran slow for no reason.

Since then, I have jettisoned Avast and Chrome, and temporarily switched to Windows Defender, and am using Firefox as the browser. I have to say the machine is an awful lot speedier.

And I'm no longer a fan of Chrome. It seems to have become top-heavy over time.

Can you recommend a decent FREE antivirus - one without any extra tentacles? Avast! seems to have bitten off more than it can chew, trying to do everything.

I read that AVG and Avast! now share the same stable, so I'm not about to go down that route.
 
Interesting .....

I run Windows 7 Pro and Chrome Canary Beta browser. I run the paid version of Malwarebytes as well. It updates and runs everyday in the background.  I used the free version of Malwarebytes for a few months and was impressed, so I upgraded.

 

I run this identical setup on a laptop and a desktop. Both running very well and just as fast as ever. Quite happy with both actually.  Tried Windows 10 ..... rolled back to Win 7 within a couple of days .... like 4 years ago and have been content since.  
 
Thanks. I've been reading that Avast! has had complaints in the recent past for maxing out CPU, memory etc. And it was working fine until I looked at the application update. I updated from within, using the update now button.

Avast was updated to version 18.something, which then updated to version 20.something in the past week.

I've decided to try Avira Free. There's the suggestion that it has less fingers in every pie.
 
Hmm, or maybe not...

It appears that by installing Avira, it has automatically installed Opera browser without my explicit consent. As far as I can see, I wasn't asked whether I wanted it or not.
 
I run the paid versions of Malwarebytes and Super anti spyware and have been for years and love them. Haven an HP WIN7 laptop and its started to slow also so I may as well unload Chrome as I use Firefox as a browser.
 
I think Firefox runs a bit quicker than Chrome. One thing I do notice, is the fonts aren't quite as 'clean' in Firefox. They're a little less clearly defined - at least to my eyes.
 
 
Successive recent updates on Firefox claim performance/speed improvements to the rendering engine.  Seems legitimate to me.

One bottleneck that happens for me is ... I often open several YouTube videos in tabs in preparation for watching them, and occasionally leave them open for a while if I get interrupted.  FF may cache some of the streams (to a point) ahead of playback.  My hard drive may thrash for several minutes upon closing the session, and/or when reopening FF later, presumably while it clears temporary/cached data.  A factor may be that my computer is 32-bit and 4GB RAM (some of which it uses for video RAM).
 
I was having more problems with Firefox and Avira. I ended up with a black screen of death - so after running some further chkdsk operations and finding some corruption of the bootstat.dat file, I thought I would try to install Windows 10.

No such luck. Stalled at 30%, so I forced the machine off. On restart, it undid its upgrade and booted back to Win 7, with a report of Error 0xC1900101-0x30004: "The installation failed in the FIRST_BOOT phase with an error during INSTALL_RECOVERY_ENVIRONMENT operation."

I updated everything, Windows Update got 'repaired', I updated again, it found a driver for the disk drive, which Win Update then decided wasn't really suitable after all.

Tried Win 10 upgrade again - same problems, reverted back down to Win 7 yet again.

Since then, Win 7 seems to have become lightning fast, boots very quickly, and I switched back to Chrome browser again as Firefox was far too clunky for me.
 
I suspect your hard drive is going bad. Now would be an excellent time to make a backup of all your data files. Then do a clean upgrade to Windows 10. It's free if you are using a legit install of Windows 7. Maybe even upgrade to a Solid State Drive (SSD) if your current drive is a spinning disk. The speed increase with an SSD is awesome.
My 2014 Dell laptop came with a 1TB spinning Seagate and was totally slow and a major bottleneck. I replaced it was a 240GB Samsung, the difference is like night and day.
 
Separately from the above , there might be who-knows-what running in the background.

A few years ago I was working at a computer tech school and the professor recommended everyone try ShouldIremoveIt. It gives you an inventory of what you have on your computer and how it works, what it does, etc.

I tried it before my stint there ended so I could complain if need be, lol. It found a half dozen programs plus at least that much bloatware that I'd never used, had never clicked on even once, and would likely never use. Yet they were all running in the background, keeping themselves updated should I ever need them. A few gave me the option to never run unless I deliberately opened them, but most had no such setting. I dumped them and there was a definite uptick in speed.

One of the things I do NOT miss about Windows is its habit of downloading random (to me) stuff to run in the background without asking me.

 
Windows 10 comes with a fairly decent antivirus feature in "Windows Security".

I've noticed my Dell desktop system running the latest W10 will occasionally slow. 9 times out of 10 it's because some program is attempting to update; sometimes it's Window itself. Often I find that just rebooting the system tends to speed up the updating process, or to install updates that are waiting and in waiting slowing the system down.

I also bought Malware Defender and can recommend it.

The latest Firefox is pretty good too. I also don't care much for Chrome. [this post was last edited: 1/24/2021-21:24]
 
While I can understand some folks affinity to older versions of Windows I cannot understand taking the security risk with a severely outdated OS. Win 7 and below are not getting any security updates and could be wide open to modern threats. While hackers may not be interested in your emails or files they may be interested in using your computer for nefarious things without you knowing. You can pile on all the malware protection you want but an old OS is and old OS and every possible hole can never be blocked.

Use a modern up to date OS such as Win 10, Chrome or Linux and be safe.
 
Spybot Search and Destroy .....

which is a great malware scanner, has ShouldIRemoveIt built in. It also has a Windows Startup UI that allows you to see what programs are running in the background, which ones run at startup and shows definitions for each program it detected. Then you can choose to disable the program not to run at startup or uninstall completely. Been using it for years now.
 
 
RJ has a situation at work involving industry-specific software for reading data and calculating a billing factor.  It's installed on an XP system.  The software went off support some years ago, and can't be moved or installed to a new system for an issue related to licensing.  What's the potential luck on updating XP to Win10?  He's retiring in May so these issues wil be somebody else's problem (his outfit is finding out a lot of things about what all he does and is scrambling to reassign the various duties, LOL).
 
>> It's installed on an XP system. The software went off support some years ago, and can't be moved or installed to a new system for an issue related to licensing.

If the software can't be transferred or reinstalled, then you by definition have no solution for a hardware failure. That's a pretty significant problem!

There are still companies running XP (or older operating systems) in specific situations where software capabilities truly can't be replaced, but where it is practical to isolate the machines to mitigate the security concerns. Sawmills, factory machinery, etc. But for anything critical, you have to be able to replace the hardware if need be, or you're just one power surge or component failure (remember the capacitor plague?) away from having nothing at all. For companies with a reliance on outdated tech, hardware backups are just as important as software backups.
 

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