this is my laptop it's the Acer Aspire v15 and I picked it up late 2016 and it was
my first working laptop that I used to edit a lot of the videos that you've
seen on this channel and make websites and graphics and basically a general
computer until I built this guy and that's that's the computer that I do
most of my work on now but from time to time I still need to without the old
laptop and take it with me if I travel or if I want to do the work from my
couch the problem is that over time my laptop has gotten slower and slower if
you're watching this video the chances are that you're probably dealing with a
similar problem with your laptop and it's a very common one the issue that
you may be familiar with is when you log in for the first time
can't let you know what my super-secret pin code is you log in for the first
time and everything slows down in fact you can't open up any apps and it's
extremely frustrating why does it do that well let's open up test manager and
take a look so you see here the disk which is the storage if you're
unfamiliar is I had a hundred percent now this doesn't mean that it's full
this means that it's activity is at full capacity means it's reading and writing
to the maximum ability it can't so any other application or thing you try to
pull up can't because there's a waiting list there's a line because it's working
on stuff well what's it working on you could scroll down that list and look at
any number of applications that start when you start the computer in fact as
time goes on and you install more programs and Windows updates and yada
yada yada whenever you turn your computer on that's like flipping the
switch in an office building and all the workers are trying to file in and punch
in for work and they're tracking online to see what there is to update and what
there is to do and logging in and you know the drill
you've worked in a place I hope you have a job and when it does that it crams
the hard drive because everything is trying to pull information from the hard
drive at the same time so that slows things down but why is this seemingly a
issue only with laptops that's because laptop manufacturers tend
to cheap out when it comes to the stores now not all of them it's just a tendency
when you get any somewhat average laptop like I have storage is one of the areas
they feel that they can sort of lower the standards on so they install slower
hard drives that only spend at 5400 rpm now that's the average laptop hard drive
speed and that is dog slow you know may not sound that slow but that means that
the disk is spinning at 5400 rpm which isn't bad but when you think about every
little bit of information it reads it has to spin around and find it on the
disk before the laser can pick up that spot on the disk with the information
that it's trying to pull and with all the information that it has
to pull on a computer for applications and software has to do that a lot a lot
so the faster the better now a standard hard drive for a regular desktop would
be around 7200 rpm which is granted a lot faster but it's still not fast
enough compared to flash flash storage is what your phone uses you may have
even noticed that your phone no matter how old it is tends to act even faster
than your laptop sometimes that's because it's using flash memory and how
you you generally use flash memory in the laptop is with an SSD or a
solid-state drive this drive doesn't have any moving parts and no rotations
that has to wait around for so much newer technology and slightly bit more
expensive however it has gotten a lot cheaper you can buy a 500 gig drive for
around 60 bucks or so or you could get a terabyte for about 120 or so depending
of course on the brand and the quality yeah sounds great but does that mean
that I have to go out and buy a whole new laptop no in fact that might be a
mistake that'd be a lot more costly what you can do how
as you can simply replace the hard drive that you have in your laptop with an SSD
now that isn't without any hiccups you will have to reinstall windows and back
everything up beforehand and then reinstall everything now after a couple
hours you could have a much faster working computer how fast well generally
speaking compared to a 7200 rpm hard drive which is in your desktop possibly
which is more of a higher standard for desktop hard drives an SSD can be
upwards to five times faster or 500% 500% sounds a lot more so we can go with
that but compared to your laptop it could be
seven or ten times faster that's fast but is that the only thing that might be
making your laptop slow well it could be a few other things most people want to
blame the CPU they say that their CPU is garbage and that could be true but for
the most part if your CPU is dual core quad core and clocks around 2.2
gigahertz or so you're probably fine that is unless you're trying to gain the
snot out of it with some pretty heavy hitters not to mention that the CPU is
pretty much impossible to replace on your laptop now the only things you
really typically can replace on the laptop are the hard drive or SSD the RAM
and optical drive if you have one speaking of the optical drive if you
have an optical drive or a DVD player built into your laptop a lot of times
that is a tray that can be removed and you can replace it with an SSD so if you
don't want to go through the hassle of ripping out the hard drive of your old
laptop you could potentially just get rid of your old DVD Drive which who is
who am i kidding who you can you're no one's using that anymore you could get
rid of that and just put an SSD in and transfer things over if you want Windows
to run off of it which I recommend more than anything else in the world you will
still have to reinstall it but it'll be a little bit easier to transfer things
over this way another thing that you should factor in is if your hard drive
is too full now this happens fairly often and if your hard drive is too full
then it's like a warehouse that's over packed and you're trying to move things
or it's really really hard and can't be
done easily free up some of the stuff you're not using anymore and that should
help a little bit the last thing we're going to talk about
is antivirus antivirus software is kind of outdated it's done if you have
antivirus it's probably old outdated and not really even useful anymore or it is
a virus in itself another thing to remember is if you try to pair antivirus
with another antivirus like if you have to installed in one system they'll fight
each other and slow down your computer and usually can tell when your cpu is
maxed out at a hundred percent when it does that
protip on the side task manager tells you a lot of things if anything's maxed
out at a hundred percent that means that you're either doing something wrong or
you need an upgrade of some sort now hold on Micah are you trying to
sneak me out of antivirus so that you can get in and steal the goods from my
precious precious that's hard to say consecutively precious precious no in
fact most of the antivirus that you can buy in a store is pretty much garbage
now oh yeah they'll try to use fear tactics and making you think you need
them in fact if any antivirus magically shows up on your computer that's a virus
you know the ones worth are like oh you have to activate now although there's
viruses detected that's all viruses in case you didn't already know but if you
have Windows 10 regularly update it you're good to go because Windows
Defender has kept me safe at least since day one and I haven't really had any
real problems I've had a lot less then I've had in the past with things even
like AVG and stuff like that so unless you have a super-secret job that
requires you to have high-level encryption and at that point they give
you your own antivirus software that they have on your own Windows Defender
does just fine and it's enough to have that on there then crowding it with
other antivirus software so to sum everything back up a an SSD is your
biggest ticket to speeding up your laptop if everything's on the hard drive
that's really slow then it's gonna take forever for anything to get around to
doing anything swap that and you're good to go
you're gonna be living in the future for a while a met check task manager
and check to make sure that nothing's running at a hundred percent you can
tell a lot by the percentages by RAM usually the system will take up to 20
percent or so maybe 30 percent of your total ram if there's a lot going on just
on idle and it's going higher than that you might want to add a little extra RAM
to help things out a little bit because when your RAM fills up it starts storing
things onto your hard drive which just is insanely slow and it's it's terrible
and you're done so at that point and that's my summary on how to unload your
laptop for more videos like this make sure you subscribe and I hope to help
you with your tech in the future see ya