Laptop running slow - any ideas? (Windows 11) or recommend a new one

John_P

I know it's an old model but it was running fine until a week or so ago.     

Dell latitude7400, i5-8365U with 8Gb ram.   It's only used for work stuff so 3 or 4 intertab tabs and word or powerpoint running.    It's gone from being fine to very sluggish - eg 10secs to change between internet tabs.  

I've run ccleaner and that made little difference - any suggestions I should try or is it time to buy something better?

ThePrettyDamned

I would consider a fresh install if you can - a factory reset can work wonders, particularly if there is a weird thing happening in the registry. Backup to the cloud first though! 

darthed1981

Go to task manager and check the "performance" tab to see if anything is messing around with your performance by firewalling something.

In my recent experience...

Teams seems to want to run in at least two versions on each pc, and update constantly - if you don't use it - disable it.

You don't mention if you have a traditional HDD or SSD - but Windows has moved passed the traditional HDD and recent versions just don't run well on them - consider the (easier than you think) process of upgrading if you have a physical hard drive.

Anti-virus?  These days the built-in Windows defender is good enough for most people, and other free offerings aren't worth the extra resources.

If you are using Microsoft Edge - consider switching - even though it is these days based on Chromium it still, somehow, manages to be shit.

As mentioned above a reinstall can make wonders, and can be done from within Windows these days (search for "reset my pc").

That laptop should still be perfectly good for general office use, so save your hard earned until you know what the issue is

John_P

Thanks chaps,    I've done a windows reset that keeps my data so I didn't have to copy a ton of files off the hd.   It's noticeably better and useable now but still feels a big sluggish so I'll have a play with setting to see if there is anything else I can do.      
Sadly I need to use teams for work and I suspect that doesn't help.

Emp_Fab

I'm hoping it doesn't still have a mechanical spinning hard drive in it but if it does....  Replace it for an SSD.  Instant massive speed boost all around.

Axe_meister

What's your memory usage? Windows 11 is becoming more of a memory hog with each update.
8GB is absolutely bare minimum these days