what would slow down a laptop ?

[Midnitewarrior4]

so been out of the tech scene for a year or two now, my grandmother has a newer laptop, low end hp, amd apu of the lower variety, 4gb of ram and whatever hard drive, all she does is use it for facebook and netflix and thats it, so really it should be fine, but for some reason it gets really slow, cant even open chrome, half the time gets stuck login into the pc itself, so i took it home, did a factory reset, set it all up, got rid of all the bloat ware and got chrome set up and everything set up as basic as i could, was fine for a day and now its doing the same thing, and i have the same problem with my older higher end laptop with a 3rd gen i7 and 8gb of ram, slow as hell even after factory reset, even though i remember when i got it, it was fast and no issues, what can i do ? shes wanting to buy a new laptop now and i know the same thing is just going to happen again, would buying a cheap ssd help anything ? cause a 60$ ssd is definetly better then getting a 400$ plus low end laptop again

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

Storage bottleneck or not enough RAM, possibly both.

[Midnitewarrior4]

Just now, orbitalbuzzsaw said:

Storage bottleneck or not enough RAM, possibly both.

ram usage isnt close to capping, and its just google chrome, cant see the hdd limiting streaming or browsing speed, login being somewhat slow i can see but barely being to able to boot there has to be something else

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

Just now, Midnitewarrior4 said:

ram usage isnt close to capping, and its just google chrome, cant see the hdd limiting streaming or browsing speed, login being somewhat slow i can see but barely being to able to boot there has to be something else

Probably that its an AMD Decelerated Processing Unit.

[Syntaxvgm]

software issues aside (check that) make sure the mechanical hard drive is still good (cant image this thing has an ssd). Maybe a smart data check with a tool like crystal disk info

[Midnitewarrior4]

1 minute ago, Syntaxvgm said:

software issues aside (check that) make sure the mechanical hard drive is still good (cant image this thing has an ssd). Maybe a smart data check with a tool like crystal disk info

ya its just a 5400rpm hdd, and software issues i dont know what else id look for, its a fresh os and google chrome, ill try the disk info on it, never thought about doing that when it was here. also just remembered its still running windows 8... any ways to upgrade still or would i have to buy an upgrade ?

[ProjectBox153]

Windows 10 and a mechanical drive = horrendously slow in my experience. Put an SSD in it and you should be good. 

[Midnitewarrior4]

3 minutes ago, Jamiec1130 said:

Windows 10 and a mechanical drive = horrendously slow in my experience. Put an SSD in it and you should be good. 

its running windows 8 now that i recall, but still was alot faster when i reset it then after a day instantly slowed right down, was still slow after the reset but you could still use the thing, might just buy a low end kigston a400 and if that doesnt work ill just use it as another drive lol

[ProjectBox153]

Just now, Midnitewarrior4 said:

its running windows 8 now that i recall, but still was alot faster when i reset it then after a day instantly slowed right down, was still slow after the reset but you could still use the thing, might just buy a low end kigston a400 and if that doesnt work ill just use it as another drive lol

It's been my experience that SSDs are the way to go. 

[Midnitewarrior4]

30 minutes ago, Jamiec1130 said:

It's been my experience that SSDs are the way to go. 

what are the chances i get an ssd swap it in and use an old windows 8 cd  in it ? would it auto enter the code ? dont really have a way of transferring files and that way it would be basic windows 8 no bloatware built in, been out of the game way too long starting to forget the basics