Windows 7 Slow computer

Stodger

Extraordinary Member
I have a Packard Bell Istart D2314 running Windows 7.
Everything runs fine but oh so slow.
I have looked into the Task Manager and I find the machine is now running 72 processes and 163 Services, even on startup with no applications running. I must confess I have no idea what most of these processes and services are and therefore I don't know if they are important or necessary or redundant but I am sure they are slowing the machine down.
Is there any way I can tell which is important and should I clean out the lists in the same way that a regedit cleans the register or is there some other clean up and speed up process?
 
Lots of things can slow a computer down
  • Physically dirty computer
  • Failing hard drive
  • Malware
  • Too many things running on the computer
For the first item you can simply look inside the computer. If there is an excessive about of dust and dirty this should be cleaned out either with canned air, air compressor or a special anti-static vacuum.

Second item can be determined by downloading and using a DFT (drive fitness test) application such as Seagate SeaTools

The third item can be hard to take care of if you don't have the knowledge or expertise, but for starts do you have any security software running on your computer? If you don't you definitely should have something. There are many free ones such as Avast that will help protect your system. At the least I would download and install the free version of Spybot and MalwareBytes adn run those both in safe mode.

The last item would just require analysis of your machine, what is running, version what you use and need.
If you open a powershell prompt and type Get-Process | Export-Csv -Path $env:USERPROFILE\Desktop\processes.csv -NoTypeInformation that should dump a list of processes running on your system. Feel free to upload the csv file here.
 
Too many issues can trigger the slowness of Windows computer, such as little free hard drive space, corrupted hard drive, virus or malware attack, or HDD slow spindle speed, too many background programs, etc. So to solve this problem, you can try to free up disk space by deleting unnecessary files/folders (right click the apps and select file location, to delete all), shut down the programs which will launch as long as Windows boot successfully,shut down the background programs, run anti-virus software, or migrate OS to SSD drive to replace the slow traditional HDD.
 
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