Slowing down....causes and fixesn

I have two different laptops. The one is a Dell. It has a smaller hard drive. It is running Windows 7 Professional. It seems like it is slowing down when I browse the internet, despite me having the highest internet speed available through my service provider (Time Warner Cable). My computer knowledge is average or slightly above, but I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions as to what could be causing the slow down and what I could do to remedy this?

 

HIya!

What model Dells do you have, additionally, do you know what CPU you have ? When did you buy them ? Can you right click on the bottom bar ( task bar ), and hit " view task manager " and show a screenshot of your running tasks ?

 

Post the specs on both your computer and your internet service. A list of recently installed software might be helpful as well.

 

Post the specs, along with what processes are running, etc.

There can be a few very simple fixes.

 

I take that you've done all the necessary maintenance stuffs, and it is still slow? There are many great knowledge users in this forum that can give you suggestions. I am on the hand, an average user and know very little.

 

First, you need to check for the cause.
Is your system free RAM running low during the browsing? When I run 50+ tabs in my Firefox, even with 8GB RAM, the memory leakage can eventually cause my browser freeze up or slowing down. So check for how much free RAM do you have when you are experiencing slowing down.

How much free space do you have on your hard drive?
Hard drives will slow down when they are getting full. This is true even for SSD. My Dell Vostro 1500 (when it was still working), it was getting slow as the 128GB SSD was getting full. After I upgraded it to a 512GB SSD, it was fast again.
You need at least 15% free space on a hard drive for it not to be slower than usual.


Second,
Once you pin point your problem, you may try to fix them. Increase the amount of RAM if it is the RAM problem. Get a bigger hard drive if it is getting full.

Other problems might or might not be solvable. For example if it is the OS and software getting too messy, a clean installation of OS will fix things up. If it is your CPU getting too old and not up to the task, you can do nothing about it since it is a laptop.

 

Well the laptop is old but I think the real problem is that the hard drive is fairly full. It's not got a ton of memory and I download a lot of stuff.. I deleted a lot of things and it helped slightly. However, how do I stop programs from automatically running when I reboot? There is stuff that runs that I don't always need but start automatically when I start my PC. I think that's a real potential problem.

 

I think you can go into your task manager from the start menu and stop things from running at start up from there. My computer often tells me I have too much stuff running at start up, but most of it is stuff I need to have so I just allow them to remain and try to stay patient for the most part. It isn't always easy to determine which programs are necessary for the laptop to run properly and which are just nonsense, which is another reason why I typically leave them alone.