A computer that used to be fine and now takes a minute to open a spreadsheet is one of the most common things we hear about. Slowness is rarely one big fault. It is usually several small things stacking up: too much open at once, a disk that is nearly full, an update waiting to install, or a machine that has reached the end of its useful life.
Work through the list below in order. Most slow machines improve at step one or two.
Try this first
- Restart properly. Closing the laptop lid is not a restart. It only puts the machine to sleep, and everything that was clogged up is still there when you open it again. Click Start, then the power icon, then Restart. Choose Restart rather than Shut down, because shut down on Windows often saves the current state instead of clearing it. Give the machine five minutes to settle afterwards before judging it.
- Close the browser tabs you are not using. Every open tab holds memory. Twenty or thirty tabs will slow a modest machine noticeably. If you keep tabs open so you do not lose them, bookmark them into a folder and then close them.
- Check your free disk space. Open File Explorer (the yellow folder icon on the taskbar), click This PC on the left, and look at the bar under your C: drive. If less than about 10% is free, Windows has nowhere to work and everything slows down. Emptying the Recycle Bin and clearing out the Downloads folder is a safe place to start.
- Let updates finish. Click Start, type Windows Update, open it, and see whether something is waiting. A pending update will often keep the machine busy in the background for hours. Install it and restart, ideally at the end of the day.
- Check what starts with Windows. Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager, then click the Startup apps tab. Anything marked High impact that you do not use every day can be right-clicked and disabled. Disabling a startup item does not uninstall the program, and you can still open it normally. Leave anything named after your antivirus or backup software alone.
- Give a background scan time to finish. Antivirus scans and cloud backups run quietly and can make a machine feel sluggish for an hour or two, usually after a long weekend or a period switched off. If the slowness started this morning and the machine has been off for a week, wait it out before doing anything else.
If that didn't fix it
Two things are worth checking before you spend more time on it.
Find out how old the machine is. Press the Windows key, type System Information, open it, and note the system model. If you cannot find it, the serial number or service tag is on a sticker underneath a laptop or on the back of a desktop. Send that through to us and we can look up when it was built.
Check whether it has a spinning hard drive. Open Task Manager again, click the Performance tab, and look at the disk entry on the left. It will say either HDD (a mechanical disk with spinning parts) or SSD (a solid-state disk with no moving parts). A machine with an HDD that is around five years old will not be fixed by tinkering. It is slow because the part it reads and writes with is slow and worn, and no amount of cleaning up changes that.
A disk that is beginning to fail shows up as slowness long before it shows up as a failure: long pauses, the mouse still moving while nothing else responds, the odd freeze. That is worth logging with us promptly rather than living with, because the fix is far easier before a drive dies than after.
What we will tell you
When you log this with us we check disk health, memory, the update state and what is actually running, then give you a straight answer. Sometimes that answer is that an hour of work will sort it out. Sometimes it is that the machine is seven years old and you will spend more chasing it than replacing it. We would rather tell you that early than bill you three times for the same hour.
Still stuck?
Log a ticket at portal.yougrowit.com.au or email support@yougrowit.com.au. If it is stopping you working right now, call 03 9028 4358.
Support hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm Melbourne time, excluding Victorian public holidays.
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