Laptop runs slow and freezes after a few minutes

[Lee_91]

Hi everyone,

My wife borrowed a laptop from her brother awhile back, a HP Pavilion with an AMD A4-1250 APU processor and Radeon HD graphics, 4GB ram. It came with Windows 8, which he wasn't happy with, but the Windows 10 free update came out while it was in our care and with permission we upgraded it. It worked great for a few months but now its really slow and freezes after a few minutes. It works fine in safe mode however.

I've checked the internet for a few solutions, and one thing that keeps popping up is a problem with Windows 10 and the AHCI driver. The fix for that is listed here: https/support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3083595/task-manager-might-show-100-disk-utilization-on-windows-10-devices-with-message-signaled-interrupt-msi-mode-enabled

I'd follow these instructions except in device manager I don't have the AHCI Controller or Standard SATA AHCI Controller, I've got the AMD SATA controller instead. I don't know if this is the same thing or not, but in the driver details I do not have the StorAHCI.sys which the fix mentions.

The problem started when my wife downloaded a custom pokemon game. I'd do a virus scan on the computer but it won't let me in safe mode and it freezes in normal. I highly doubt that the pokemon game had a virus though because it was made by her brother and I downloaded it onto this computer and this is still fine.

Since the laptop works fine in safe mode I think that means the hardware is okay (I'm no expert though). Does anyone know what could be causing this and how to fix it? I feel guilty that it broke under our care.

Thanks in advance.

 

[webworkings]

Just because you think it was one program doesn't mean it couldn't be a different one, or an update, etc., that is the cause. The only way to check for sure will be to do a good deep virus check as well as a good malware check. However, if the computer won't let you do anything in normal mode, then while in "Safe Mode" I would check what is running at start up. What programs are running in the background. These are things you should be able to check and deal with. Freezing or no freezing. It just may take a while. Then remove anything that isn't needed on the device, or should not be auto starting.

If this doesn't resolve it, and you still can't do virus and malware checking in normal mode, try doing a restore to a point before any recent changes were made on the device.

Worse case, should none of this work, you would need to then consider doing a reset of the device.