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i think i need a new laptop, IT people's advice needed please

cooldan

cooldan

i like pizza
10 Years
Joined
Jul 21, 2011
Messages
7,099
Location
Ealing, London
hiya fellas. now i know what you're thinking, and no, you're wrong, that's not it. it's not a particularly old one either -it's an HP Pavilion dv6 (i'm reading all this off the screen now) running Windows 7 and here's some numbers
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it just seems to be getting slower and probably isn't helped by this either
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so i was wondering ..... why do these things get so full? i look at all my programs and files - all the pics and gifs and vids and word files and excel and assorted gubbins ..... and it all only comes to less than the 430GB it says i used up.

i have 95GB of itunes, and 30GB of photos (includes all holidays over ten years) and 95GB of assorted films and videos (no, stop that) and another few GB in my 'miscellaneous' folder. that leaves a gaping hole of over 200GB - what the **** is it? and where?

so i was wandering round in PC world today and i picked up a nice 2TB storage drive for £70, and i'm currently backing up my entire computer's files (the stuff i know about, that ~220GB i mentioned) in case it blows up and i lose it all..... and i wandered over to the laptops and noticed that there's plenty for decent prices but they all seem to be operating Windows 8 which i think i remember was universally panned? and isn't there a new one coming out?

so what gives? are they now getting rid of all the ones with an obsolete operating system on to empty their shelves? should i wait to buy a new one? do i even need a new one, should i just reformat the entire laptop somehow (how do i save the operating system and the Microsoft Office that i think it either came with or i bought at the time?) and plonk my saved files back on it? would that empty loads of gubbins out and speed it up?

and are HP laptops generally crappy? mine gets super hot, is that acceptable? (a year or so ago i tried to take it all apart to get to the fan to get the dust out, but after more than an hour and about 50 screws i reached a dead end and gave up and put it back together .... and no, i didn't break anything)


lots of questions i know. do i wait before buying a new laptop? do i just reformat it?
i don't play any games on it, but i do surf a lot and watch videos on it and sometimes telly on it. skype video calls. but i'm sure i don't need the vast computer brain it probably has in there.

suppose i'd better sign off with a few vaguely entertaining and slightly rude gifs, as that's my thing i do

gif assshaker.gif gif alizee back.gif gif alizee front.gif gif alizee wiggle.gif
 
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Try running CCleaner to get rid of all the chuff that windows creates, then download and open FreeDisk Usage Analyser from http://www.extensoft.com/?p=downloads which will give you a visual representation of which folders are largest.

There's a good chance its the hidden application data folder under your account name.

If you want to wipe it and start over, then you can make a note of your office product key by running a program called produkey http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html which spits out a text file with it in. Then start the laptop and press ESC, then f11 to start the recovery procedure.
 
thanks Carl, downloading CCleaner now then i'll click that thing.

"There's a good chance its the hidden application data folder under your account name"
i don't know what that means but it sounds good
 
It will be fine. I bet 200gb was in the recycle bin.
 
cooldan said:
reassure me please
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All the items you've ticked on the left are the file types that will be deleted. You might not want to get rid of some of them, such as cookies or your browser history, so this is a last chance to go back and untick a few ("Are you sure? Y/N" sort of thing).

If you just want to see the back of everything selected, click "ok" and they'll all be removed as per your tickbox choices.
 
thank you. and thanks to Carl i managed to identify and remove around 140GB of mostly duplicated iTunes music files and old backups

i should now be good for a while, but my other question stands re Windows 8 and new laptops and how far is my machine dated etc
 
but my other question stands re Windows 8 and new laptops and how far is my machine dated etc
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Your laptop is fine for the type of things you use it for (surfing, vids, pics) and Windows 7 is a perfectly capable OS...I don't think you need to upgrade as I don't think you'll get any value from it.

At a high level the things that make a computer fast or slow for non gaming use is the CPU and the RAM. Your CPU, although being older, is a quad core with hyper-threading (which means it can virtualise another 4 cores for a total of 8) so is fine for modern multi threaded applications. You've got 4Gb of RAM which isn't a huge amount these days but again shouldn't be a limiting factor unless you wanted to run modern games (which you don't). Windows 7 will probably take approx 1.5Gb of that RAM for itself leaving 2.5Gb for all the other things you want to run at the same time. The reason more RAM is good is that running applications (Chrome, Skype etc) will load the data they need into memory (RAM) as it's faster to read it from there when they need it. If you run out of RAM then the application needs to read the data it needs from the hard disk which is slower.

All that being said, i think your laptop has enough grunt in both of these areas for your needs. The reason your laptop is running slowly is most likely due to the amount of processes and services that run in the background these days following your years of ownership. You can check this in a couple of places.

The first is Task Manager which you can find when you hit Ctrl+Alt+Del. There's a tab called Processes which will show you everything running at that time plus the amount of CPU and RAM being used. A base install of Windows 7 probably has approx 30 processes running (this is a guess as I can't remember for sure :) ) so if you've got lots more than this then it's a contributing factor to the slowness.

The other thing to check is the number of services that run automatically when you start the computer. Google "Windows 7 admin tools services" to find out how to get to this view. You can see all of the services installed on your computer and whether they start automatically or are disabled. You can manually disable services in here that aren't needed and that will help with speed as well but you need to know what the things you're messing with do as some of them are needed for Windows to run properly.

The easiest way to sort out both of the above is to do a re-install of Windows as this will bring you back to the start but it will also blow away everything on the laptop so you need to be sure you've backed everything you want to keep up to your new storage drive. Proceed slowly and with caution as you don't want to lose something you can't get back :thumbs:
 
nice one Chris, thanks for taking the time and trouble to explain all that.

btw @ronsplooter here - i have about 103-110 processes in the background (it flickers and changes). i have no idea what most of that crap is
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i have no idea what most of that crap is
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No worries Dan :thumbs: That's a lot of processes but not unexpected on a machine you've had for a while and used lots. You could spend some time trying to figure out what they are and then uninstalling their related applications or services if you don't need them but that's a lot of hassle. Best idea is still to blow it all away and re-install Windows but make sure you've backed everything up that you don't want to lose.....especially pictures and home videos!
 
I've known too many people loose things in a wipe and fresh install, so normaly advise against that. The main reason for running slow appears to be how full your hard drive was (sounds like that is now sorted). Hard drives work well provided you have a minimum of 25% of it's capacity free, after that they slow down more and more as the remaining capacity fills up. Another thing I've found are 2 or more installs of virus checking programs tend to work against each other and it looks like you have AVG and Ad-Aware Antivirus in that list of processes....
 
I'd recommend using a different AV than AVG, especially if its the free version you're using on the laptop. Personally have always used Kaspersky although no doubt others use different ones which are as good
 
I see a lot of people being advised against free av, AVG being one of them. At the moment AVG appears to out perform a lot of paid for AVs in both reactive and proactive detection. Way ahead of Kaspersky which is my personal favourite.
 
Peter is correct, I use to have to test various AVs to see how they impacted on each other. Because they both wish to load first and get to opened files first, they can cause a bit of a resource fight and only one work efficiently.
 
I use the official Microsoft one (google for "microsoft Secutiry essentials"), Combined with Malware bytes for Anti-Mal-ware.

Personally i would re-install. Back up Mail (if using pop3), Bookmarks, documents and photos (as you should do every month), and store OFFSITE...I have seen too many people loose ALL their photos :(
 
The easiest way to sort out both of the above is to do a re-install of Windows as this will bring you back to the start but it will also blow away everything on the laptop so you need to be sure you've backed everything you want to keep up to your new storage drive. Proceed slowly and with caution as you don't want to lose something you can't get back :thumbs:
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Pretty much. Waste of time trying to fix with malware bytes & ccleaner. You should just get another external drive and backup all your tunes, pictures & whatever else you need. Then instead of a reinstall from disc, you could run the recovery drive you have already from the bios to put it back to factory. Probably take you half hour tops to recover.
 
>You should just get another external drive and backup all your tunes, pictures & whatever else you need.
Yep, done that

>Then instead of a reinstall from disc, you could run the recovery drive you have already from the bios to put it back to factory.
I have no idea what you just said. This factory only makes boxes to ship nails.

>Probably take you half hour tops to recover.
Hmmmm
 
Look at the second picture you posted: RECOVERY D:

This drive has everything from factory. When you turn the laptop on you can push a key to load this drive or set it in the BIOS to load this drive instead of C:.

It will be an automated process (that takes half an hour) to put the lappy back to how it was bought from the shop. Including all the drivers & chipset it was shipped with.
 
I always wondered where that came from. Is that the button Carl mentioned then? I can just do that and make a cup of tea while it scrubs itself?
 
Depends. Some manufacturers block you doing it until you change the bios to do this. Notably asus motherboards I think I've seen before. Best to google the laptop and stick recovery mode at the end and you should find exactly how to get there.

It will probably ask you a couple of questions but yeah you can make a cup of tea or whatever while it's doing it. This way is easiest for you because it's going to save you searching for all the drivers & stuff.
 
I suspect this might be overkill plus once it's reverted back to the original install won't he have rather a lot of operating system updates to upload...?
 
I don't think so. It's a small price to pay (a bit of time) to get your computer running nice again.

You're not going to get the same performance trying to fix with all those programs, it sounds like it's past that, especially seeing as there is stuff like Utorrent and horsebook things on there, he has bound to pick all sorts of crap up.

Just freeing up space or constant defragging isn't going to help.

I found a general rule with WIn7 & XP without an SSD and heavy internet use is redo windows at least every 6 months.
 
I'm also needing a new laptop - my Dell Vostro is literally falling to pieces. I'm sick of Windows so was thinking about getting a Macbook. Is it worth the huge jump in price for one of these?
 
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