Laptop Running Very slow and Typical Solutions Not Working! Please Help

remixislandmusic

Prominent
Jan 1, 2018
56
0
610
Hello reader, It was about a week ago when my problems arose. I own a Toshiba satellite c55-b laptop that is around 3 years old. It typically is relatively fast unless I try realistic games. It use it a lot for games as it runs the ones I like reasonably well on low settings. it gets moderately warm during gaming but is always reasonably fast. First my computer seemed a little sluggish and reluctant to load anything. I was curious so I ran Norton and Malwarebytes but they found nothing other than they wanted to uninstall advanced system care (ill abbreviate it to ASC). I did uninstall it as ASC kept bugging me to update the program and purchase the full version. I restarted the computer and was greeted with a message that said something about scanning disc under the Toshiba logo. I let it run and it said scanning disc 0% and never went further after many hours. I assumed it was a hard drive issue and asked someone that I know is in the field and they said it probably was a hard drive about to go. I had a backup hard drive that after ordering a replacement usb cord for the drive It proved to not work on multiple computers. I ran smart defrag and that didn't help. I cleared a bunch of unused files off of my system and now that I think about it forgot to clear them out of my recycling bin. I uninstalled some apps and that didn't help much either. I took the computer to staples and they ran a scan on it which showed some viruses and minor registry errors. No issues were found with the hard drive although the manager which helped me said the message I was getting at startup indicates a disc issue. I checked in device manager and it says that the Hard disk and the usb ports (which will power devices but not recognize them in file explorer) are "working properly". Staples wanted $160 usd to run a scan that would fix those problems it showed but not necessarily fix the issue causing the computer to run slow. This price is way to high for me who is wanting to try to build a pc in the near future and may not keep this computer for too much longer. I ran ccleaner after this to tidy up the registry although I know Microsoft doesn't recommend it... I am willing to try a lot. I also ran another program (avisia maybe?)that found a few "viruses" that I believe weren't malicious as they were programs I have used for awhile and I believe it thought they were harmless pups although it called them Trojans. the program wouldn't let me delete them until it was done and it crashed in the middle of a scan. the computer was getting progressively slower at this point. I deleted that program after hearing it doesn't find actual viruses. I tried starting it in different modes including safe mode with networking to get to the internet without the system not responding 15 times in a row but finally got through in normal mode. safe mode with networking didn't load my wifi card's driver and windows wouldn't let me start the service so i was forced to wait forever for it to allow me to download avg. needless to say that found nothing and its boot scan included with avg was sitting there and not going through. I'm stuck and somehow think my computer is going bad. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!
 
Solution
Bit wall of text here so a bit hard to sort things out, but first thing I would do is replace the hard drive and install Windows clean on that.

remixislandmusic

Prominent
Jan 1, 2018
56
0
610
I ran HD Sentinel and it said my drive health was 8% and it had moved the files from the bad parts of the disk to good part. This became an issue when copying the files to an external hard drive, because windows wasn't aware of where HD sentinel had moved the files. I got tons of error messages and even a blue screen of death during copying the files. I was able to get the files I absolutely needed off of the computer and pulled the plug on the hard drive. I put in a 500gb replacement HDD out of a backup drive and installed windows fresh on that. It works like a champ now.

To anyone reading this in the future: If your laptop is running slow, has no viruses, and is showing 100% disk and/or 100% CPU usage backup your computer so you don't lose data and download Hard Drive Sentinel. If it says disk health is bad you defiantly need a new hard drive!
(Note if you have an SSD hd sentinel will not work and this may not apply)