Why is my computer so slow?

[holyzombiejesus]

OK, bear in mind I haven't a fucking clue what I'm talking about. My PC has been working fine for ages. There's some free anti virus stuff on it and nothing seems to be wrong in that regard (no pop-ups or weird search engines being forced on me). I use Chrome on it but the default thingy was recent automatically changed to Microsoft Edge. I don't use that but the icon is on the bottom of my screen next to files and itunes (when it's open) and the chrome logo thing. PC is crawling now. May be due to loads of people working from home? Or may be down to this Edge thingy? Is there a quick way of speeding things up? I've got loads of space in the memory as all my music is on an external hard drive so am only using about 25% of inbuilt memory. Even doing stuff like opening files is taking about 5 times longer than usual. Oh, also am accessing work system through PC so that may be an issue?

[boki]

Oh, also am accessing work system through PC so that may be an issue?

It might well be that.  I'm working from home and we connect to the work network via a VPN - the finance system we use was going at an absolute crawl to the point where it was almost unusable for certain functions.  We eventually got around it by remotely connecting to a machine on campus which lessens the traffic to our laptops in a way I won't even pretend to understand.

[Sin Agog]

Because it smoked weed all day instead of attending lectures.

[JesusAndYourBush]

Is it just your net connection that's slow or your pc as a whole?  If the latter then open task manager and see what's using most resources and if there's something on there using more than you think it should.

If you have Microsoft Edge and Chrome both open at the same time then be aware that a browser is a resource hog and close one of them.

Also have you added any Chrome extensions recently, because the more you have, the more resources they'll use.

[Kryton]

Check if you have applications running that hog your memory. Maybe prevent some of these from running on startup (google how).
Defrag your drives.
Run some anti-virus software and registry software like CCleaner.

[Sin Agog]

Adding RAM yourself's pretty easy, by the way, even for someone like me who's never fucked with the hardware before.  Download a little program like 'mrmemoryscanner' to see what upgrades you can do and how many free RAM slots you have.  Buy them- they usually come in pairs and can be dead cheap, like a tenner for two on ebay.  Unscrew the casing, slot them in until you hear that pleasing clicking sound, and maybe wipe off some of the dust from your fan with a dry rag while you're in there; screw the shell back on, and everything should be considerably faster.

[pigamus]

Type Default in the Start menu to change your default apps. You should be able to uninstall Edge if you don't want it.

[pigamus]

Also type Add to bring up Add or remove programs, go through the list getting rid of crap you don't want

[JesusAndYourBush]

Adding RAM yourself's pretty easy, by the way, even for someone like me who's never fucked with the hardware before.  Download a little program like 'mrmemoryscanner' to see what upgrades you can do and how many free RAM slots you have.  Buy them- they usually come in pairs and can be dead cheap, like a tenner for two on ebay.  Unscrew the casing, slot them in until you hear that pleasing clicking sound, and maybe wipe off some of the dust from your fan with a dry rag while you're in there; screw the shell back on, and everything should be considerably faster.

I've been thinking about adding/increasing my ram for some time now and seeing that link encouraged me to take the plunge.  Got me some ram ordered off Amazon and I even remembered to use the CaB affiliate link.

[Chedney Honks]

Have you opened any email attachments from members of the England cricket team?

[Hat FM]

my work system crawls sometimes when i have certain pages with ads and stuff open on the browser. how is it when you have your internet browser closed?

[Hand Solo]

I've got loads of space in the memory as all my music is on an external hard drive so am only using about 25% of inbuilt memory.

That's disk space though, not memory, so has no bearing. Unless you mean virtual memory which is the slow partition your system will use if it needs more resources. You might have Chrome and Edge running in the background from boot and they both use up a lot of resources. Go to Run>type msconfig>selective startup.. then Startup tab/Open task manager, there you can pick which programs you don't want to start in the background  Boot>advanced options>number of processors>set to maximum.. this should get it to boot quicker. Services tab/click order by Manufacturer.. then uncheck anything that isn't Microsoft, apart from services that you recognise you need, like Intel or Sound drivers. Re-boot.

Also, I've always used Chrome but have of late noticed it seems to make my laptop crawl it uses so much memory, I've switched to Vivaldi, it's uses less memory and is a lot more customisable. For instance I always hated the tabs on CHrome would have the close button when you float over them that would end up with you closing a tab by accident sometimes, you can have that in Vivaldi or change it so they disappear and you have to double-click a tab to close, also you can set tabs into stacks, or click on a video and put it picture in picture while you browse any of your other tabs and still keep it onscreen. Also haven't needed to install any Extensions yet, it has adblocker built in, and puts unused tabs to sleep to save memory and various other things like it keeps closed tabs in a Trashcan so you can go back to them later or sync tabs with your phone. There's loads and loads of other stuff it can do, the only slight problem is you can't sign in and sync directly across from your Google account, you have to create a Vivaldi account then exporting in Chrome then importing the files for Bookmarks/Settings/Passwords.

All in all, Windows 10 is just Windows 7 with a fuckload of bloatware to slow things down. This is a tool to remove a lot of that stuff but requires some tinkering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E6OT_QcHaU

[JesusAndYourBush]

Ok, I got some new ram and have run into problems.
It seemed to work fine at first but then while browsing, Chrome stopped working and became non-functional.
I looked in event viewer and there were a bunch of errors saying "ZoneAlarm\Logs\tvDebug.log is corrupt and unreadable. Please run the Chkdsk utility".
So after running chkdsk everything was fine.  I did a memory check and after about 20 mins said "A number was written to memory, and when that same location was read back, a different number was found." and it said that a number of times.

Then it worked fine for a whole evening.

Next day it worked fine for a couple of hours, then I tried a memory check again and after about 20 mins got the same error as the first time.  Then shortly after, while browsing, Chrome closed by itself and got a BSOD moments later.

I then took one of the ram out, intending to do a memory check on the other one - in an attempt to determine if one had errors, or both, but everything went to shit and I crashed within minutes. Then I crashed during the shutdown procedure and thought 'fuck this' and put the old ram back in.

Now I'm back on the old ram and things are working perfectly again.

I checked and the bios had the correct settings for the new ram., but is there something else I should have done while installing the ram or have I just got bad ram?

The memory check uses 100% cpu so it must give the ram a really good hammering.  It's as if it worked fine but then once the memory check got it nice and warmed up it failed.  Can bad memory behave in this way or did I miss something?