[Closed] Slow PC - is it still worth reinstalling?

Exactly what he said. Exactly the same apps.

More than 10 tabs and it tells me im out off RAM, despite 4gb in there

Of course it doesn't help that Firefox eats memory, but that's not the whole problem.

Well thats ruined it im on Opera

Delete any crap (remember to completely uninstall)
Check what services are starting up be default and remove any you're no longer needing.
Run a Registry Cleaner
Run a defrag
Consider setting up a large Pagefile

That should make a good bit of difference

Yes, done all that - even done the thing where you can bung a memory card in and it uses it as extra swap space. Hasn't helped much or at all.

Remember, it's not like the bits get old and worn.

Unless they are made by Hope (allegedly)

Yes - though I did do a memory check just in case.

Ho hum, guess it's a reinstall needed - that's tomorrow evening sorted 😉

I need 64 bit as only using 3 of 4gb it seems

To bring my old xp laptop back to speed I did a reinstall of the original setup and turned off updates. If I get a virus I'll just redo the process

Can also be the hard drive getting old and slowing down.

Have you tried CCleaner? You can download it for free if you google it. Back in my PC days it was the best bit of software that kept my pc lumbering on. Do all the stuff mentioned above and then run CCleaner. It will get rid of a whole load of other little buts of crap your PC accumulates through normal use. Things like small programs and executables that windows creates all the time in the background through normal use that now references other files other programs that no longer exist or work. All this stuff slows your pc down. The first time I ran this it got rid of about 30Gb's of this sort of crap.

There are also tools on there that enable you to optimise certain core settings of windows to suit your uses. I never used it on Win7 so not sure of how effective it will be, I had the Windows just before Vista, but it was great on my pc, I would run it, notice a decent improvement in general running, booting up and shutting down for about 3 months before running it again.

I have had 2 work laptops die , mobo went bad on one and wouldnt recognise any ram in one of the slots so it ran slow as a dog- IT reinstalled twice before they worked that one out. And the other was a gpu gone bad hogging a heap of the ram - both apparently bad traits of the dell e series due to heat

One of my personal laptops hdds went slow, changed out the hdd and it was back to working well... Its my car diagnostics laptop these days as its still xp.

A reinstall wont hurt , but it wont always sort the issue , its a low cost thing to try though.

Msconfig.exe (run it from Win+R) and see what's starting up with your machine. You've probably got Adobe, Apple and god knows what else running update processes all the time which slow the machine down.

Cheers - this is a Dell (well, Alienware) and it does tend to run hot. I'll have a go with those suggestions, thanks.

When you say elderly how old is it? and what processor and how much ram does it have?

Any Alienware laptop that came with Windows 7 on it shouldn't be so old that it's no longer useable, so I'd say it'd be worth checking.

My Alienware laptop is a few years old (i5 with 6GB of RAM and Windows 7) and still seems pretty sprightly even with Photoshop etc. My work laptop has an i7, 16GB of RAM and an SSD so is pretty quick but for most stuff the old Alienware isn't noticably slower.

+1 CCleaner
Picks up the dregs that an uninstall leaves behind.

Any Alienware laptop that came with Windows 7 on it shouldn't be so old that it's no longer useable, so I'd say it'd be worth checking.

It came with XP I think - 32bit, 4Gb, I can't remember the rest as it's at home.

If I was upgrading to modern software it could no longer handle, I'd understand, but it's the same stuff it's always had.