Lenovo IdeaPad Y580 - incredibly slow startup/general performance

[astro14c]

My father has a Lenovo IdeaPad Y580 (~2012?) that is unusably slow. I am not sure when it began slowing down but he has not used it for several months and this weekend I picked the machine up to take a look at it.

It has an i7 2 core chip + 8G RAM with 1T drive (5200rpm), running Windows 10.

I would think those specs would be decent to use for web browsing and simple document handling, but the start up time is terrible and then once it starts up - pretty much any program shows "(not responding)" and then finally completes when given a task.

I have all the latest Windows updates installed, I have run scf and dism utilities, I have defragged the partitions, nothing odd appears to be running in task manager (and cpu/disk/mem usage seems low), I have done a clean boot and run Norton performance updates (and iolo system mechanic as well).

I am primarily a mac user, so not sure what to check next. Is there a tool to verify the chip and memory are performing to spec? Is the machine old enough to just be unbearably slow?

Would repartitioning the drives and a clean install of Windows help? I upgraded the machine from Win 8 to 10 quite some time ago (not a clean Win 10 install) and at that time it seemed ok. Running out of my limited ideas - if there are some obvious suggestions, I would appreciate it. Thx.

--travis

 

[Jwpanz]

The Intel CPU Diagnostic Tool is available for download on Intel’s website. It can check the CPU for errors. For the memory, search using the Windows search bar for Memory Diagnostic. You can run that as well.

In my opinion and experience that slow performance is usually the fault of the hard drive. I would recommend replacing the hard drive with an SSD through a cloning tool.

 

[astro14c]

@Jwpanz - thanks for the tips. Ran the tools - all looks good. I will take a look at upgrading to an SSD.