Is Your Laptop Running Slowly? Try These First.
Does your laptop take an age to wake up of a morning? Does that little spinning circle appear every time you open the internet, leaving you drumming your fingers while you wait?
Before you decide it's worn out — or, worse, that you need to buy a brand-new one — take heart. A slow laptop is very often a tired laptop, not a broken one. In nine cases out of ten, a few simple tidy-ups bring it back to life. You won't need a repair shop, and you won't need a single technical skill.
Here are seven things to try, in order, starting with the gentlest. Stop whenever your laptop feels sprightly again.
1. Turn It Off and On Again — Properly
It sounds almost too simple, but it is the single most effective fix there is. Many of us never truly switch the laptop off — we just close the lid. Over days and weeks, little jobs pile up in the background and clog things up.
Click the Start button (the Windows symbol, bottom-left), then the power icon, then Restart. Let it settle for a minute once it comes back. You'll often notice the difference straight away.
A restart is like a good night's sleep for your laptop. It clears away the clutter of the day and lets it start fresh.
2. Close the Programmes You're Not Using
Every programme you open quietly uses a slice of your laptop's energy — even ones you've forgotten about. If you have several windows open at once, close the ones you've finished with by clicking the small × in their top-right corner.
3. Tidy Up Programmes That Start by Themselves
Some programmes launch the moment you switch on, whether you want them or not — and they slow the whole start-up down. You can ask the unnecessary ones to wait until you actually need them.
Press the Ctrl, Shift and Esc keys together to open the Task Manager. Click the Start-up apps tab. If you see something you don't recognise or rarely use, click it once and choose Disable. Don't worry — this doesn't delete anything; it simply stops it leaping up uninvited.
4. Make Some Breathing Room on the Disk
A laptop with almost no free space becomes sluggish, rather like a desk so cluttered there's nowhere left to write. Windows has a built-in tidy-up tool.
Press the Windows key, type Disk Cleanup, and open it. Tick the boxes for temporary files and the recycle bin, then click OK. It safely sweeps away files you no longer need.
5. Have a Word With Your Web Browser
If your laptop only feels slow when you're online, the browser (Chrome, Edge or Firefox) is usually the culprit. Two things help enormously: close any tabs you're not reading, and avoid having a dozen open at once. Each open tab is a little programme of its own.
6. Let Windows Update Itself
Updates aren't just about security — they often include speed improvements too. Press the Windows key, type Check for updates, open it, and click the button. Let it finish and restart if it asks. It's best to do this when you don't need the laptop for half an hour.
7. The Big One: Is It an Older, Spinning Hard Drive?
If you've tried everything above and your laptop is still treacle-slow, the cause is often the type of storage inside it. Older laptops use a hard drive with spinning parts; modern ones use a solid-state drive (SSD), which has none and is dramatically faster.
Swapping an old hard drive for an SSD is the single biggest speed boost a laptop can have — often turning a five-minute start-up into a ten-second one. It's an affordable upgrade, but it does mean opening the laptop, so it's not a job to rush.
You don't have to tackle this alone. Ask our IT Man — it's free, friendly and with no obligation. Tell us your laptop's make and model and roughly how old it is, and we'll tell you honestly whether an SSD upgrade is worth it, or whether a tidy-up will do the trick.
Free Tools Worth Knowing About
You don't need to spend anything to keep a laptop healthy. These are all free and trustworthy:
| What It Does | Free Tool |
|---|---|
| Check for viruses and nasties (a common cause of slowness) | Windows Security — already built into Windows. Press the Windows key, type "Windows Security", and run a Full scan. |
| A trusted second opinion on malware | Malwarebytes Free — from malwarebytes.com |
| Clear out junk files | Disk Cleanup — built into Windows (see step 4 above) |
Stick to the official websites above and you won't go wrong. If a pop-up ever demands you download a "speed booster" or "PC cleaner", ignore it — those are usually the very thing slowing you down.
In a Nutshell
A slow laptop is usually a tired one, not a poorly one. Start with a proper restart, close what you're not using, free up some space, and let Windows update. If it's still slow after all that, the storage inside may simply be showing its age — and that's something we can help you weigh up. Either way, you've not done anything wrong, and you almost certainly don't need to start from scratch.
