Topic: Windows 10 makes any machine dreadfully slow?

[EV607797]

I have or have purchased for others, about six PCs/laptops that came equipped with W10.  With most of them, I opted out of their forced app purchases through their store.  They warn that this action will slow down the computer and that it is irreversible.  Regardless, I'm finding that even brand-new laptops practically crawl.  On mine, it took almost ten minutes to open Office 365.  All machines have 4G RAM in them, which is supposedly sufficient, but what do I know?

I find that running CCleaner will usually bring them back up to reasonable speeds, but they're still painfully slow.  Am I doing something wrong or is this just planned to force us into the next version of Windows?  It seems to be getting worse.  Some are on wired LANs, others on wireless, but speeds seem to be at or better than about 75.  I'm in the middle of setting up a brand-new laptop for a relative, which is the exact model of another I got for my mother that crawls and loses its WiFi connection constantly.  Any suggestions?  Is it just me?

[Butch Cassidy]

You need at least 16 GB of RAM  for Windows 10, and 32 GB is better.  Your computer will be very slow even with 8 GB of RAM.  If you can't get 16 GB of RAM, downgrade to Windows 7. 

I base this on my experience with  7 computers in an office.  All the computers were the same make and recent Intel i5  models.  The computers that had 8 GB all crawled, while the computers that had 16 GB ran OK.  I upgraded all of them to 32 GB and then they all ran fine.     

Unfortunately there is a RAM shortage right now.  It is expected to last through the end of 2021 or beyond.  The current version of RAM is DDR4.  It is more expensive now than it was before.  If your computers still use the DDR3 RAM, you can probably get that on ebay for not too much.  Or pull it out of some old computer.   

[TexasTechnician]

Hello Ed! I'm not sure what you're talking about when you say you opt out of the app store purchase. But as Butch said 4 GB of RAM may get you to the starting line but it will surly slow you down in finishing the race!

I will say this though, when you open a new computer out of the box and set it up it WILL take updates that will slow the computer down noticeably for a little while. I just let it run it's course and things begin to speed up.

I do NOT know a great deal about Windows 10 Home so I may be speaking out of turn but I'm guessing the updates are very similar for home and PRO.

[liquidvw]

I have several older laptops that when new were windows 7 machines.  They now have windows 10 and are good enough for what I use them for.  IMO, you need to upgrade the RAM to 8GB and replace the HDD with a SSD and do a new install of windows 10.  This is not very expensive to do.  2x4 GB of RAM can be had used on ebay for about $30 and a new 256GB SSD can be had on Amazon for another $30.  All in for $60 and a few hours to install windows 10.