PC is so slooooooowwwwww - is it me?

Agony aunt required - help, I'm about to commit PCuicide.

My laptop is a 4 years old HP Pavilion G6 (AMD 1800 CPU which is admittedly crap, 6GB RAM, 750GB HDD), Windows 10 and Bitdefender AV.

It takes 30 seconds minimum to load any new webpage, the CPU is usually running 99% with what I consider reasonable apps taking the CPU % (Chrome, Windows Explorer, Bitdefender, nothing else over 5%). E.g. I've been just surfing for an hour, nothing else, yet the CPU is 99% with Chrome running 3 threads totalling 60% CPU.

I'm on BT Infinity fibre but want to throw the PC out of the window most of the time.

The wife's netbook (6 years old Packard Bell S1, Atom CPU, 2GB Ram, 128GB SSD, W10) is the same - Facebook never loads properly and other pages slow like mine.

So - could our home network or AV or something common be causing this?

Or is our hardware so obsolete that simply surfing and emailing is too much?

All recommendations (apart from "go Mac"!) gratefully received. Even considering going Linux although I've never tried it before.

Many thanks in advance for all advice.

Your wife's notebook is junk and doesn't have anything like enough ram at 2gb 4 is a minimum but I don't recommend anything less than 8 if someone was buying new. The atom is very meh as well. The only thing propping that up is the SSD.

Yours isn't so clear cut as it should go reasonably well. Check what is all running in the background and clean it up if you can. Might also be worth a virus scan with malware bytes just in case

If Chrome is being naughty you could uninstall it, run CCleaner from Piriform to clean up the loose ends, reboot, and reinstall Chrome.

Macs can be painfully slow as well, especially later operating systems on earlier hardware.

try clearing cookies and cache then restart chrome.

Try turning off your anti- virus software and visiting a couple of safe sites.
I had a problem with mine which was causing the pc to run very slow and burning processor time.
Also worth running malwarebytes and cccleaner.

Can you right click on the tool bar at the bottom of the screen, Start Task Manager.

We want the tab - Processes click on the column CPU. This should order the % Processor column high to low or low to high. We want to see the big numbers at the top. It sounds like you are going to see some number over 90, these are the processes you computer is working hardest on. Often this could be svchost, but might be Internet Explorer or could be your anti-virus. Let us know what you see. If there is a box at the bottom left which says 'show processes from all user, click that as we want to see all background tasks, and not just processes associated with your account.

Once you tell us if you see the CPU running 100%, we will know where to start. If it is low, and is just on launching IE, then it could be your anti virus software as said before.

Let us know what you see, and we ca go from there.

Get rid of your mechanical spinny disc and fit an ssd in your HP Pavilion G6, make sure to do a clean installation, that will speed it up for you.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions so far - sorry I'm late getting back (no, I wasn't sitting waiting for my PC to respond the whole time!).

I was using my iPad this morning - chalk and cheese - pages load in <5 seconds, scroll up/down at speed and it loads as you go. The PC is nowhere near as fast.

I suppose I realise the wife's netbook needs replacing (although many are Atom/2GB still); I agree that the G6 should do what I want OK.

MarkiGSA - Cleaned it up as much as I can. Starting is always slow as I have NatWest's Rapport security package but I cannot uninstall that as it protects my online banking. It isn't an issue once loaded; I don't fully shut-down, laptop goes to standby on closing the lid. Might load Malware bytes and run a scan.

Shugie - I'll try to uninstall/reinstall Chrome etc. but I went from Firefox to Edge then Chrome chasing a solution - each was better initially then slowed.

Shay - already done that, thanks.

chablis - in the OP I quoted CPU usage - it all looks essential stuff - I think the CPU just isn't up to it all but suspect there is something else. You mention svchost - sometimes there are multiple versions running occupying lots of CPU. I presume it is an essential Windows function (I can't kill it anyway!) Currently WMI Provider is using 43% - updating Windows I presume.

AberdeenAngus - Bitdefender doesn't use much CPU/RAM - I'll go naked and try a safe site like UKGSer!

Leedude03 - I considered an SSD but since the Disk usage is rarely near 100% in Task Manager, I presume it is not a bottleneck.


I won't waste everyone's time too much - 'moff on hols soon so I'll try some of the above and will report back when I get back.

Cheers,

A

defrag - it might help

In windows 10 go click on the settings button just above the power off icon in your start menu, once in settings type Task Manager in the search bar once opened in the processes tab check what is killing your CPU (You can toggle the tabs CPU Memory Disk & Network) end the process.

Also go to the Startup tab in Task Manager and disable all irrelevant processes that are enabled on start up these attach themselves when you install stuff, in mine the only process enabled is Windows Defender everything else is disabled.

Then restart your PC I'm not promising this will fix it but should help.

If your PC has just started being slow recently restore it to a recent date when it wasn't so slow using system restore.

Install / run Malwarebytes, that should already be on ther in my opinion.

I'm not too familiar with how Chrome and its plugins can kill the CPU, but consider trying Firefox or IE for variation.

As to svhost, I've had times when it will use all remaining CPU for days on end, this can happen when it has failed patch download. You can kill that, it will just restart at next boot up, but it will give you some kind of indication of what impact it has. On the High CPU Process, right click, and Go to Services. This will show you the services running under that, you can stop the windows update one. When I've had this in the past, I've needed to interrupt the auto update process, download patch, apply, and got it all back to normal so I can turn auto update back on.

Remember, Google is your friend - svchost high cpu

Good luck