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.

https://www.shouldiremoveit.com/index.aspx
 
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.
 
#17

"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 is sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo satisfying to have that happen! How wonderful it is that RJ gets to witness it first hand. I've had to be content with former co-workers telling me, "The yearly 'X' report is due soon. The big boss was NOT happy to find out that you always handled it so nobody has any idea how to do it."
 
 
There's a squabble currently happening about who is going to handle one of the tasks.  Only RJ and his dept head understand the details ... and the uppity head surely won't do it.  RJ said "such-and-such can probably learn."  Head snapped "such-and-such won't have time for that."

About which RJ said (to me) I handled that plus everything else I did but such-and-such can't.  I spent 44 years making sure it was kept in order, now it's going to be a big mess.

I said yup, that's what happens, don't let it be your problem.
 
I have an older HP Pavillion G7 laptop running Windows 7 that has diagnostic software installed for new Stihl products thats really slowed down. I'm also going to be downloading Husqvarna diagnostic software now as well. I've been weary about converting this to Windows 10 for fear it wont handle it and cause all sorts of trouble. Maybe I should just buy a new laptop lol.
 
#15

"Spybot Search and Destroy ....."

I seem to remember using that years ago and being happy with the results.

#21

I'd try a few things before investing in a new laptop.
1. Defrag (defragment) your disc. That tends to speed everything up.
2. Use SpyBot Search and Destroy with Should I Remove It? Delete or move to a hard copy anything you don't need.
3. Check your start-up operations. Make sure you don't have rarely used things (ex. PhotoShop) starting up and idling in the background waiting for you to use them. Most programs can be set to stay off (and not use processing power) until you actually open them.
4. Max out your memory (RAM) if you haven't already. You didn't say which G7 you have but I Ducked a few of them and they all showed 8GB as the max. Maxing out your RAM gives the greatest bang for the buck in terms of hardware improvement. Swapping out memory is embarrassingly easy and takes about 2 minutes once you have the laptop open. Just make sure you back everything up before you start.

Doing the above has always sped up my computer, regardless of what software I'm using. I'm sure some other guys here will have some other suggestions. Let me know if you have any questions.

Jim
 
 
I use both Spybot and Malwarebytes (free versions).  I don't recall that they've ever found anything of concern on my systems.

Firefox 85.0 was released today.  No longer supports Adobe Flash (I uninstalled Flash a couple months ago), although the Frigidaire unimatic animation on the front page still works so apparently FF includes code to interpret Flash (or Robert has already revised it).  Also has added defense against "supercookie" trackers which are said to persist even after otherwise manually clearing cookies.
 
Have a try at Linux.

I use Solus at present, it is very intuitive for someone coming over from the dark side. (windows.)

It does have a couple of  small clunky issues on my computer so I will probably go back to Linux Mint soon.

You can install many versions of Linux onto a USB drive and then boot from the USB, so you haven't messed with your windows install. That is a good way to play with Linux and get a feel for it.

I am currently using Solus off a 32Gb USB stick, the computer was my Dad's tiny desktop with Windows 10, I have kept it Windows at present "just in case" but I do everything on Linux so when I get round to it, I will probably wipe Windows and install Linux Mint on the computer's SSD hard drive.

I occasionally use my partner's Windows 10 computer - I don't know how anyone puts up with it.

there are a bazillion flavours of Linux, I would start with one of the most popular. You can read about most of them on distrowatch website.

the different flavours of Linux are called distributions, or "Distros." Hence Distrowatch, a place you can find out and access each distro.

https://distrowatch.com/
 
Chris Gizmo,

Yes, my experience with my Linux debian operated scale nueteral 32 bit multi protocol model railroad controller so far has been good. It's evermore updatable, and comes via the web.
Being a Unix based open platform software, it's very popular. It even displays the penguin logo when starting. The all touch 8 inch screen icons are many, and variable. It can design and store track plans, manage route control and automated operatiom of trains, turnouts, signals an accessory decoders. 320 possible digital adresses are possible. I has feedback decoder capability also.
While connected to internet or wifi, wireless computer, phone, or tablet operation is possible. It supports two additional d.i.n. pin control devices, and also others via an s88 adapter expansion port. It has two usb ports for a mouse, etc., and a third for phone or tablet charging.
It has diagnostics built in, as well as user fault prompts. It can also log and send system errors to the manufacturer.
One newer reason the hobby is called the worlds greatest. Will take me years to learn all it can do. I may utilize just a portion.
A man in Switzerland is building an ho scale complete route BLS railway (original, not with new Alps base tunnels), and says he will never totally finish all the scenery, etc.
 
I ran another CHKDSK /f /r operation. Just to be on the safe side.

Nothing untoward, and all is tickety-boo. No errors.

I read somewhere that file corruption on the disk can be generally caused by 'dirty shutdowns'... Such as deliberately powering off whilst the machine is doing something in the background, like installing updates.
 
Reply #10

<span style="font-size: 14pt; color: #008000;">If you download the the "Reason" program in this post you will be billed $27.95. This charge appeared on my PayPal account although I never entered any PayPal information or authorized it. Very strange since my PayPal password is very complex. Ii's not worth the trouble to dispute this since PayPal only offers assistance on eBay transactions, however I did close the account. The "Reason" program found nothing that my Norton protection didn't already take care of. Dumb me...</span>
 

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