Why is my computer slower now than it was when I bought it after a clean installation?

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I've just reformatted my home PC. It's an i7-920, 16GB RAM machine (so it was pretty good back in the day).

I've installed a clean installation of Windows 7 and I'm wondering why the PC is much slower now after a clean installation than it was when I first bought it (take into account that I have no service packs installed so it's pretty much the same conditions).

Someone told me that it's because I've gotten used to faster computers. I don't think this is the case since it suggests that opening the start menu/file explorer always took a few seconds instead of being instantaneous.

Can someone tell me what's going on?

Shookie

Posted 2014-08-31T13:28:42.693

Reputation: 107

what in detail is slow? Also post all hardware you use. – magicandre1981 – 2014-08-31T14:02:08.253

I seriously doubt it takes a few seconds to open the start menu on your computer. – Ramhound – 2014-08-31T14:38:16.700

@Ramhound i've seen computers as slow as that loads of times! – barlop – 2014-08-31T14:51:21.997

1Have you checked the health of your hard drive? For example: chkdsk /r c: What kind of hard drive do you have? Maybe spinrite or mhdd scan on your drive. – cybernard – 2014-08-31T14:56:19.730

1After your clean install did you install the current version of ALL of your drivers? – cybernard – 2014-08-31T14:57:04.057

If it takes seconds to display the load times then you have hardware problems not performance problems – Ramhound – 2014-08-31T15:35:16.120

Answers

Try running chkdsk /r to repair any corruption on the drive. Such corruption can cause a slow down like that and chkdsk /r can fix that. (though if you have a bad drive then consider changing it!)

You can also run a bootlog analyzer, though I haven't tried any for Win7

Also, sometimes if windows hasn't fully loaded and has a lot(perhaps too much for it) to load quickly, then you might get that. So to rule that out you could try waiting some number of minutes.. and see if it is always quicker after x minutes. I saw a comp where one had to wait 10min from seeing the desktop, till windows loaded then it was quicker. Though I removed some stuff from it (norton if I recall..and maybe some other things), and some antimalware scans might've helped, and I got it down to a 3min after seeing the desktop, for it to load.

barlop

Posted 2014-08-31T13:28:42.693

Reputation: 18 677

The hardware runs at the same speed, but the software is slower.

Software written this year is developed and benchmarked on hardware that's new this year. Software written five years ago was developed and benchmarked on hardware that was new five years ago. As the hardware gets faster, the software developed on it is allowed to get slower (or "to take advantage of modern hardware", to look at it a different way).

If you could install and run the same non-updated OS that your PC had when it was new, it would be as fast as you remember. But that would be reckless, because you need those updates for security. The updates replace pieces of older software with pieces of newer software: fewer security bugs, but less efficient execution.

aecolley

Posted 2014-08-31T13:28:42.693

Reputation: 342