One of the computers at work has suddenly become very slow to respond. Boots up to windows as normally then takes a bit longer to load the desktop. Takes ages to do anything else. Press the Start button and it can take 15-20 seconds for it to pop up. Double click to load a program and it could take a minute to load up. The trainee doctors last used it to do a presentation, had problems with using it and the projector, and it has since been problematic. They (of course) deny any wrong doing and would have been supervised by a senior GP.

So far, nothing in the processes or services that look unexpected. Malwarebytes scan has been normal (though now plan to rip the hdd out and scan it as an ext hdd). CCleaner removed about 1GB of crap. No obvious hardware conflicts. It has mcafee bloatware but that's always been on there.

The computer is about 8 years old and I was contemplating updating the HDD to a small (40GB) SSD as it is mainly used for presentations/intranet hosting. But now this has happened.

Any ideas?

Back up any data then re-install Windows or re-image as appropriate. It's not worth wasting time diagnosing </IT Engineer>

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Would love to except I don't have the images. Primary Care Trust owns the hardware. Have already backed up the intranet.

Hard drive on the way out would be my first thought

I'm tempted to think this as well but is there any way to verify, other than the age of the computer?

If you're lucky the SMART status may show something, although IME it's a bit hit and miss in terms of pre-catastrophic detection.

Defraggler (from the same people who do CCleaner) has a 'disk health' thingy...

Along with the ability to remove small creatures with shaggy orange hair.

Will have a look at it. It has sped up slightly since I disabled mcafee's resident program and a bit more useable.

It costs money, but Spinrite from GRC would be my first step.

It's a seagate barracuda 7200 sata drive. Ran the Seagate tools for SMART and Short Drive Test and both passed successfully.

Personally my money is on one of the following:

- Insufficient RAM
- Too many processes starting at start-up
- Paging file needs to be disabled, reboot the computer and re-enable it with the size being managed by Windows (or disable it completely).

Something has just occurred to me... Does this machine use local or roaming profiles? I'm wondering if it's worth either creating a new user or logging on using different credentials to try and eliminate a possible profile issue.

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Local. I think. You can log in with the same username/password but you have different files on each computer.

Will try a new account and see what happens. Will also try pagefiling. Number of processes overall hasn't suddenly changed AFAIK. More RAM and SSD are in my plans.

Right, decided to check the system spec before swapping it with another machine. Turns out it had only 256MB RAM! Reseated the ram which helped with loading stuff and reset the pagefile. But some things still take time eg extracting a 7MB zipped file. Should have taken seconds but still takes minutes.

Very slow for a P4 2.8GHz optiplex gx520 machine. 512 mb ram (think it's pc6400), and barracuda 7200rpm hdd. Not gotten round to doing much else at the moment.