Have you ever noticed that up to a certain point your laptop worked perfectly fine, but on one “fine” day the laptop's performance dropped to such an extent that the operating system boots up longer than usual, programs open with difficulty, the system often freezes or gives blue screens with errors ? What is the reason for this? Let's look at what factors could affect the performance of your device, and determine the basic methods for eliminating such unpleasant situations.
Notebook performance has plummeted: what is the reason?
In the general case, the reason for this laptop behavior should be sought in the hardware and software. Software components that are activated on their own can cause an increased load on the central processor, RAM or graphics adapter, but sometimes they can be purely physical problems associated with equipment failure or the most common pollution of the internal filling.
Thus, all possible situations when it is noticed that the performance of the laptop has fallen too much can be combined into several categories:
- pollution, dust and moisture;
- damage to components on the motherboard;
- exposure to viruses;
- antivirus software loads;
- lack of free space on your hard drive;
- too many active (and unnecessary to the user) background processes;
- outdated hardware drivers.
Naturally, this is not all that could provoke a decrease in the speed of a computer device, but only the most common situations. Therefore, we will consider methods for their correction, starting from the above list.
Notebook performance has fallen: what to do first?
For starters, it would be nice to use special testing utilities to help identify problems of a physical nature. Particular attention should be paid to temperature indicators. If you notice that the temperature of the central or graphic processor is above normal, the fans work with an unusually high noise level, you can hear extraneous effects when accessing the hard drive, you need to take action immediately.
Most experts recommend immediately disassembling the laptop and at least clean its insides from accumulated dust. It is also sometimes advisable to replace the thermal grease on the processor.
Check for viruses and antivirus software problems
The impact of viruses can also cause laptop performance to drop dramatically, but today this most often manifests itself not only in increasing the load on system resources, but also in the inability to access the Internet. Browsers load too long, pages open slowly or don’t open at all, start tabs or search engines change, etc. In this situation, you need to perform a more detailed scan of your laptop for viruses using portable scanners rather than regular ones.
In general, the best option is to create bootable media based on the Kaspersky Rescue Disk program, followed by starting and checking the laptop without loading the installed operating system itself.
Unfortunately, many antiviruses can also cause such situations. Why did laptop performance fall? Very often, this can be noticed immediately after updating the antivirus to the latest version, in which all user settings are restored to their initial state. Yes, and the installed modification itself may turn out to be more demanding on system resources.
In this case, try to set a reduced level of protection or set the background scan settings for the time period when you are definitely not working with a laptop.
Is there free space on your hard drive?
Sometimes you may notice that the performance of the laptop has fallen after updating the system itself. Apparently, the problem here is either overfilling of the hard drive, or in the unfinished updates themselves. See how much free disk space is left in the system partition. As a rule, for the normal functioning of Windows it is necessary to keep unoccupied about 10-15% of the total partition size. To eliminate such problems, you can perform standard cleaning using the built-in system tools, but also use the removal of system files, which will completely get rid of outdated updates or even files of the previous assembly.
Also, as an additional measure to increase the speed of accessing the HDD, it is desirable to check and defragment all the available partitions, which ordinary users very often forget.
If the reason is in the updates, you can try to uninstall recently installed packages. But you need to get rid of them in order of priority. If a failed component is detected, it should be excluded from the repeated search, in the simplest case using the Show or hide updates utility from Microsoft.
How to disable unnecessary background processes and services?
Finally, if you notice that the processor performance has fallen on the laptop, or the RAM is too busy, you will have to disable the background services you don’t need. First, check the startup menu and deactivate unused processes there.
Then disconnect unnecessary components of the operating system itself by using their viewing in the standard section of installed programs. Also, if you have the necessary knowledge, pay attention to the services section, in which you will need to completely deactivate all those that are absolutely necessary for Windows to work.
Checking the current status of drivers
Device drivers are also not the latest components that can cause performance degradation. Since most of them cannot automatically update Windows, it is best to keep device management software up to date using special automated applications that independently monitor the release of updated driver versions, download them from the websites of manufacturers or developers of such software, and then integrate into the system without explicit user involvement. You can use utilities like Driver Booster.
Optimizer Programs
In order not to deal with manual troubleshooting, it’s easiest to use automatic optimization applications. Among them, CCleaner, Windows Manager, Advanced SystemCare, Easy Service Optimizer, etc. can be singled out. Such programs have quite a lot of tools for removing computer debris, managing background services or automatically launched processes, and resolving system registry problems , and to search for vulnerabilities, and for automatic unloading of RAM.
In conclusion, it is worth noting that sometimes the problem can also be connected with the actions of the user himself, who, when setting up the power supply circuit, turned on the saving mode instead of high performance or balanced mode.