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OK, here's an obvious question which typically gets the "fragmented drive and/or virus and/or too many programs running" answer.
The thing is, I'm not a dummy (I'm a software engineer, although not for PC's), and I know that none of these things are true.
I have a relatively new HP laptop running Win7 Pro SP1 (64 bit), with 4GB RAM (3.8G usable). I used to have Microsoft Security Essentials as my antivirus, but for the last year I have been using AVG Free instead.
I've had it for about 18 months, and until about 3 months ago, it was fine, but then it started running slowly. Very slow startup (10 minutes!) and then just...sluggish.
I don't have a lot of programs run on startup (and I've checked all the possible places where they could be hiding, using Sysinternals Autoruns. Process Explorer shows nothing weird - nothing is apparently using more than a percent or two. the disk is not fragmented, and it's been cleaned up.
I've done a System restore as far back as I can, and it's still slow.
My specific questions are these:
Is it possible that in my zeal to minimize cruft, I have disabled a service which is actually needed? Are there any obvious examples of services which SEEM like they are not important (either by their name or because they don't have any explicit dependencies) but which could cause slowdowns if they are turned off?
Could AVG be the main culprit? If so, why am I not seeing CPU peaks or something similar in Process Explorer?
Is there a good logging tool which I can use to try to figure out whether there is some thrashing going on or whether there are errors I can't see in the built-in windows event loggers?
FWIW, I have looked at a number of similar posts, but I've not found anything very useful...yet. If someone can point me to a great post/answer which could solve this, that would be great - I looked at 16 posts this morning.
roryhewitt
Posted 2015-07-30T17:00:25.417
Reputation: 85
If this problem transfers to new installations of Windows then it isn't a software problem. – Ramhound – 2015-07-30T17:13:31.823
Possible failing disk? have you run some smart tests? How can I read my hard drive's SMART status in Windows 7?. A failing disk can cause performance issues due to errors reading from the swap space or other areas of the disk.
– DavidPostill – 2015-07-30T17:31:48.117@DavidPostill - I downloaded GSmartControl and the HDD passed the "Overall Health Self-Assessment Test". However, I see what LOOK like high values in Spin-Up Time, Command Timeout, but it's not clear what those might mean. But no reallocated sectors or raw error reads or bad blocks. And the drive is only 18 months old, so I'd be surprised if it has problems. FWIW, it's been in a docking station all its life... – roryhewitt – 2015-07-30T23:11:41.143