If your old laptop is starting to show its age, there can be any number
of issues affecting its performance. Here are five likely culprits for
why your laptop is running so frustratingly slow and five solutions to
return it to its former glory.
How you can remove that shortcut arrow on your desktop screen
1. Spinning hard drive
I speak from experience when I say
moving from a traditional spinning hard drive to a solid-state drive
(SSD) is the best thing you can do to revive an old laptop. Without
needing locate data on a spinning platter, an SSD is inherently faster
than a mechanical hard drive.
If your laptop has lost a step and uses a spinning hard drive, the first thing I would do is upgrade to an SSD. I replaced my MacBook Pro’s hard drive a few years ago with a Samsung 850 EVO SSD and my MacBook Pro felt like a brand-new machine. It’s a fairly easy procedure (see how to replace a MacBook Pro’s hard drive),
and SSDs have come down in price and up in capacity over the years. You
can get a 256GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD for less than $100, and Samsung
now offers the 850 EVO SSD as big as 2TB. Your laptop could conceivably
get both better performance and bigger capacity with the addition of an
SSD.
2. Crowded hard drive
The more files and applications you
collect, the more cluttered your hard drive becomes. The more cluttered
your hard drive becomes, the harder it becomes for your laptop to locate
the data you request. The harder it becomes for your laptop to locate
the data you request, the slower your laptop runs. The slower your
laptop runs, the more frustrated you get. The more frustrated you get,
you more you turn to Google
for answers. The more you turn to Google for answers, the more likely
you land on this article to help you speed up your slow laptop. Hi,
there!
If your laptop already has an SSD or you don’t want to
replace its spinning drive, you can still speed up your laptop by
cleaning up its hard drive, removing files and applications you no
longer need.
On a Windows laptop, open Control Panel and click Uninstall a program. You can simply select apps from the list and click Uninstall to remove them and all of their associated files.
Technologies that can blow your mind!!!
3. Short on RAM
Another cheap and easy upgrade to make to a
sluggish laptop is the addition of more RAM. Your laptop’s CPU can
access data faster from its RAM than its hard drive or SSD, so the more
more RAM it has, the more data it can store there for quick access.
Adding more RAM is straightforward for both Macs and Windows laptops. In
fact, it’ll probably take you longer to find the type and amount of RAM
that’s right for your laptop than it will to open your laptop and
physically add the RAM and close your laptop back up.
In Windows 10, open the Task Manager, click the Performance tab and then click Memory. Here, you’ll see the speed of your laptop’s memory and how many memory slots are in use.
4. Too much multitasking
You can speed up your laptop without
opening it up and adding new hardware simply by asking it to do less.
If by lunchtime you have multiple apps running and dozens of browser
tabs open, then you might be asking your laptop to do more than it can
handle. Your laptop’s performance will improve (and its cooling fans
might stop spinning) if you cut back on multitasking. Quit apps you
aren’t using and close the tabs you don’t need open.
To take out the guesswork about which apps are using the most system
resources, both MacOS and Windows offer utilities that show you the
amount of strain each app is currently placing your CPU, memory, disk
and network. In Windows, open the Task Manager. In MacOS, open the
Activity Monitor. Both utilities show the percentage of system resources
currently being consumed and offer buttons to quit apps so that your
laptop can reallocate those resources.
So those are some of the many reasons, try doing one yourself to find out results and ensure solutions
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