HP Pavillion 15-ab143cl - Extremelly Slow boot and High CPU/HDD usage

[salsaguy]

Trying over a week to help out one of my best friends who has a HP Pavillion 15 - ab143cl laptop. He uses it for Lightroom Photo editing and so this is important to get back up and running properly.

Specs: 16 GB RAM; AMD Quad Core A10-8780P APU and AMD Radeon R7 M360 graphics; 5400 RPM SATA HDD. Windows 10 Home x64 bit

It has been running EXTREMELY SLOW (many may mins >2-5 to boot to windows login screen and load al l the startup stuff before you can use it) and had a VERY HIGH HDD and CPU usage rate and was unusable.

I had used MANY of my tools as I always do as it seemed to be pointing to a possible virus infection.

I didnt come up with any virus or trojan using Windows Defender OFFLINE; SuperAntiSpyware; Malwarebytes; Avast and Emisoft Emergency Kit antivrius software tools.

Only found normal tracking cookies, which I removed.

Yes I did all the Windows10 updates and the HP updates using the appropriate tools.

Yes I also ran the HP Performance tune up application (Twice!)

I also checked the internal HDD for bad sections and all was good. Took almost a day to compete!

I also checked the defragmenation and it was VERY BAD (over 85% fragmented)  so I had that fixed.that (took all day). But even after that it was still way slooooow. No real difference in speed to use or boot windows.

Did a SFC system file check and CHKDSK utils as well and found no issues.

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I also ran a BOOT Scan using Avast for any hidden trojans/viruses and DID find many instances of "decompression bombs" and "ZIP archive files corrupted" error messages from the boot time scan log of Avast.

If the decompression BOMBS ARE dangerous how do you suggest I remove them or is this a false positive?

From what I read online they do  seem bad. Ive never encountered them before so.... curious what to do.

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Other possible issue is the graphics driver or a bad HP driver/BIOS install.

I tried to update the video card driver but that didnt help. There were 2 different ones on the HP support site. I entered his S/ in and thought I installed the correct one but....now not so sure.

I am getting blue screens on boot now (resolved).

I have had it load into safe mode but after a week I am running out of ideas.

I have backed up SOME of his key data but not all and he does not have a complete SYSTEM image of his drive and does not use a cloud backup service I like I do with my laptop using Backblaze)

All his photos are stored on external HDDs but there are some on the internal C drive that were not xfered yet so I did back those up to my backup HDDs.

Don't want to have to do a clean Windows 10 install if possible as I would have to reinstall all hi programs as well but......not sure what else to do.

I would need to male sure it does the HP version of windows and not just the regular windows as its a HP branded installation and so you need to be able to keep the Windows activation

Also when he gave it to me it had a "No Fan" issue right as I turned it on so I opened it up and cleaned it all out and then it was able to boot. Still has a buzzing like the case or something is hitting the fan/out of angle/place but that didnt make this slow PC issue as it was already there before I cleaned the fan.

Any ideas on what I should try next?

I uninstalled the HP Update program as I read there was a bad version out there that might have caused issues but that didnt help either.

If his PC is infected I dont want to clone the drive to a new SSD and then install the new SSD and have the same issue so.....

even with a slow 5400rpm spinning internal HDD it should NOT be that sloooooow and using a lot of ram and HDD and CPU percentage.

The antivirus he has been using is Trend Micro Advanced Security which I am not familiar with and it seems to be partly to blame for consuming a LOT of bandwidth. He has a paid subscription and I would suggest to him to stop using it and go with something that doesnt suck up so much memory and background usage. I have disabled it temporarily and disconnected from the internet to check if that helped and it didnt seem to do much better in speed.

Any help is MUCH appreciated.

I am very tech savvy but this one is really kicking me in the you know where

Thank you again in advance!

Please let me know what other info you would need to help me diagnose and resolve this as this "project" has turned into a nightmare!!!

[salsaguy]

Still no progress....

Still need help to resolve

Ive been working on the video card/graphics driver issue with no luck in this post here:

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Video-Display-and-Touch/AMD-Radeon-Display-Driver-2-avail-Whi...

Any ideas?

[salsaguy · Accepted solution]

Well I gave up and finally said enough is enough.

Backed up all his data (pix and docs) and then did a full "REFRESH THIS PC" using the HP Recovery USB stick option.

All good now.

Still working on all the MANY years of WIndows 10 updates but at least its super fast again (<20 seconds to login screen) and less than 1 min to load all startup programs.

No error messages and no BSODS.

Should have done this long ago but didnt want to have to have him reinstall all his programs and stuff but sometimes its a NO WIN situation.

Thanks all