PC Issues!

[JC724]

So there may not be any concrete answers for this question but any guidance would be appreciated.

My laptop uses windows 7(Intel i7). It is roughly 5-6 years old. It was still working good up until about 3-4 days ago. It just started choppy for interval time frames. Example I will be watching a video on itunes or windows media player, I could be watching Netflix, or simply typing a paper in word and it will freeze and run slow, then normally then freeze again and run slow. Does this off and on for like 60 secs(when it freezes). So it may run normal for like 5-10 mins then freezes for 60 secs. Now at first I thought I might have gotten a virus, but I am very careful on my laptop. I never go to any unsafe sites or download things(at least not in a very long time). I mostly go to my School website(college stuff), Netflix, Hulu and youtube. I did transfer a ton of downloaded videos from an external hard drive from a trusted source about 2 years ago. I can't imagine if there were any issues from that, it would take 2 years to take affect.

I am wondering if my laptop could have just started having issues out of the blue, because it is 6 years old? I have about 60 gigs free/left out of 500 gigs.

I do updates on my anti virus software webroot and spy bot weekly, not sure if that would cause any issues.

Any ideas what the issues could be? Or any suggestion on how to make it better? Do you think I just need to update to another windows OS or get another laptop?

 

[pendragon1]

first two things I would look at are:
1. is it clean? blow out all the fans and ports with compressed air until nothing comes out. incase its overheating and throttling.
2. HDD. a 6 year old oem laptop drive is getting old. test it with HDTune or HDSentinal see what theat says.
you can also leave task manager open to watch for programs eating cpu or hdd usage.

 

[cyclone3d]

A few other things to do.

1. Delete everything in C:\Windows\Temp - Once so much gets in there, Windows can start to freak out.
2. Delete everything in C:\Windows\Prefetch - same as above and I have seen where sometimes it seems like something corrupted tries to load from there and can cause problems
3. Disable System Restore (just for now if you want to turn it back on after the end of this, that will be fine although I have never had good luck with System Restore actually working like it is supposed to). Under Control Panel --> System --> Advanced Settings --> System Protection
4. Disable the swap file - it can become too fragmented and/or corrupted and cause issues. Same place as in step 4 but under the Advanced Tab --> Performance --> Advanced --> Change (under virtual memory) - change it to No Paging File for now. It will ask to reboot, but don't do it yet until after step 6.
5. Do a drive cleanup through Windows (Right click on the drive, select properties, and then click on Disk Cleanup). When it comes up.. after it does the first scan, then select Clean Up System Files. Once it is done scanning, select everything and then tell it to get rid of it.
6. Open up an Administrator command prompt and issue these commands:
powercfg -h off ( this will disable hibernation, you can re-enable it later with this command if you want - powercfg -h on )
chkdsk c: /f (this is to do a disk check - the one in Windows is a piece of junk and usually doesn't work)

Then Reboot and let it run through the disk check - guessing it is going to find some issues.. at the very least some free space that is marked as allocated - that right there when it is fixed should speed up your system.

7. Disable indexing for drive C: - after so long the index can get corrupted and cause issues - Right click on the drive, select properties, and unselect the box that says for it to index file contents. Wait for it to do it's thing. (you can re-enable it at the end of these steps if you really want to.
8. Now do a defrag of drive C: It will be under the tools tab on the drive properties you are already in.

Once all this is done, go ahead and reboot. You can now re-enable the swap file(you want to re-enable this one), system restore, hibernation, and/or indexing if you want.