100% disc use when using PowerPoint

[Vickimag23]

Hi all. I have been having an issue with my laptop for a few months now. It’s a hp notepad and has windows 10 installed. 4GB ram. It works fine using the web browsers and Microsoft word and excel. On task manager it says disc space is around 30-40% when I have lots of things open which is fine and it’s quick enough. I’ve recently started a little business and I have 100s of little images (PNG) that I have saved on a several PowerPoint presentations. As soon as I open the PowerPoint presentations my computer freezes and the disc space goes up to 100%. The presentations are around 600mb to 1GB in size. I’ve tried sooo many things to try reducing disc space but nothing works. As soon as I try to work with the images on PowerPoint the disc space jumps up to 100% and my laptop is unusable. I understand that the images are probably large and that’s what’s slowing my laptop down. It’s a big file to cope with. I don’t know much about computers so I’m not sure if it’s the low 4GB of RAM that is causing my laptop to slow or something else! On task manager it says that the memory being used when the PowerPoint is open is close to 4GB but over 9GB (must be virtual memory) is allocated so does this mean RAM isn’t the issue? Also if I install any kind of anti virus the computer slows down in a similar way. I don’t really want to buy a new laptop as this one works fine and is only a few years old. Is there anything I can do physically to the laptop? Replace something?To increase the disc space? To help it cope with larger files. Any advice would be great. Thanks.

[Huffer]

We need the model number to understand what hardware you have now. You are throwing a pretty tough task at the laptop and it would challenge any computer with only 4 gb of memory. My guess is you have an entry level machine with a slow mechanical hard drive, budget processor, and we already know minimal memory. More memory is a must if you want to try to use this machine for your work. You do not want to be working in virtual memory which is hard drive space trying to act as RAM and slows operation to a crawl. If you do not have a solid state drive I also suggest you install one of those as the boot drive. In many cases, a budget processor is just a hard stop on using the machine for any kind of heavy lifting. 

[Vixmag]

Sorry I thought I’d put the model. It’s 15-da0511sa.  I know it’s pretty basic but Im literally just opening up and working on a PowerPoint presentation. Annoying that that’s classed as heavy lifting as it seems like a basic thing to me. I have took your advice on the virtual Ram 👌 and looked into getting an SSD. No idea where to even start with that. Looks like I’d have to take the back of the laptop off.  Do you have advice on any SSDs that would be sufficient for my laptop model? And the size that would be ok for my sort of use? I will look into it more. Thanks so much for your advice. 

[Huffer]

It's a Core i3 so not as bad as I thought. The heavy lifting is not the powerpoint per se its the file size. That all has to load into RAM and be processed by the video and CPU. Pages 38-50 show how to access the internals. 

Service Manual 

You have a dedicated M.2 slot for the new form factor SSD. You can use the fastest kind; NVME. I suggest something like this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD_BLUE-SN570-500GB-2280-speed/dp/B09HKG6SDF/ref=_pa_sp_search_thematic_ssp...

For memory this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Timetec-PC4-17000-Unbuffered-Notebook-Computer/dp/B01N0V41QP/ref=sr_1_14?cr...

You have an open slot. Adding another 4 gb module will be inexpensive and very noticeable.

Post back with any more questions or please accept as solution if this is the info you needed. 

[Vixmag]

Thank you ever so much for taking the time to reply. It’s really appreciated. I will look into this and get back to you hopefully finding this to be the solution. Cheers. 

[Vixmag]

Hi again. Can I ask if it’s possible to add in a 8GB Ram instead of a 4GB ram into the spare slot? Or would this be too much for my computer? And I assume I’m ok to add more than 500gb SSD? I was going to get the ones you have posted a link to buy might buy bigger if they would work. How would I know if they are comparable if I choose different ones? I’ve looked up the ones on the service manual but would rather get it from Amazon. Thank you in advance. 

[Huffer]

Max memory is actually 32 gigs or a pair of 16 gig modules. Its better, but not actually necessary to match memory sizes in both modules. No size limit on SSDs. Up to 4 TBs on the market, up to 2 TB very commonly found. 

[Vixmag]

Thank you so much. I will stick to the sizes you’ve advised. My husbands laptop is 8gb RAM and the files work fine on his. Maybe a future upgrade of 2x8GB. Really appreciate your advise. Hopefully it works. Will let you know and mark as solved if it does.  Cheers 

[Vickimag23]

Hi again

so I have installed a 4GB Ram module and a 500GB SSD last night and they are working great this morning. Thank you so much. The powerpoints are working much faster and the laptop is not stalling and freezing. So far so good. I really appreciate your advise honestly.

I was hoping to ask you another question while the discussion is still open. I have another HP laptop - model 15-da0503sa. It has been awful from 12 months after I bought it in 2018. I had to have the hard drive replaced after 13months as something happened to it after a windows update. PC world did this for me. Then for the past 6 months the touch pad has playing up, not working or acting erratic so I have changed the drivers etc. which work for a while but then the same issue was happening. Microsoft advised I try upgrading to windows 11 which I did and that worked great for a few weeks. Then on start up it kept going to the recovery options and nothing would work to get windows to load. I had to make a media drive thing on a USB and boot it from that and re-install windows again. This has happened 4 times in 2 weeks so I decided to down grade back down to windows 10 2 days ago thinking there might be a compatability issue. Then a few days later the same happened. I managed to restore it  and I did a hardware diagnostics thing on it and it said that the lhard drive might need replacing? Gave me the code etc. Do you think this is right? Another harddrive? The one inside the laptop at the moment is seagate mobile hdd 1tb 1rk172-568. So i wanted to ask is it usual for hard drives to only last a few years? It was replaced at the end of 2019. Should I bother replacing it? or do you think there might be another issue? Seems strange that it started happening as soon as I upgraded to windows 11. And finally what hard drive would you recommend? Is seagate a good brand or should I choose something else? Off Amazon preferably. Thank you so much in advance.

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

If you are getting a hard drive error Code then the issue is the hard drive and yes they can and do go out in a couple years. 

Service Manual 

M.2 SSD in red and HDD in green

I would ditch the mechanical hard drive and install an NVME M.2 SSD instead. See the diagram above. 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-CT500P2SSD8-500GB-Internal-2300/dp/B086BGWNY8/ref=sr_1_3?crid=NVYXH...

Post back with any more questions and please accept as solution if this is the info you needed.