Extremely slow notebook

[Harding949]

Mt new notebook is running extremely slowly.  Even when I have no programs open I can hear the hard drive clicking away and the fan running fast.  Programs are slow to load and video buffers. I have tried turning off the cloud snyc and there are no windows updates running

[banhien]

@Harding949 

Notebook IS-db0500  is an invalid model/product. What is it ? Please use the following way to find out model/product of your machine

     https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c00033108

Please do NOT post its Serial number (s/n).

Regards.

[Harding949]

It's a HP laptop I5-db0500 product 8UD54EA#ABU

[banhien]

@Harding949 

Looks like your machine is an HP Notebook - 15-db0500na, its specs

       https://support.hp.com/ie-en/document/c06502408

From its specs, it only has

• 4 GB DDR4-1866 SDRAM (1 x 4 GB)   (just enough for Windows 10)
• 1 TB 5400 rpm SATA                               (very slow by today standard)

It does not have enough RAM to keep workloads in memory therefore system has to page/swap many times in a millisecond to a slow HDD. The swapping/paging process will force the slow HDD to spin itself to dead. You can make your machine runs faster by

1. Adding more RAM (first) to avoid paging/swapping. Unfortunately it ONLY has 1 slot of RAM therefore all you can do is to replace 4GB with 8GB using

               https://www.crucial.com/memory/ddr4/ct8g4sfs824a/ct17769835      (will be downgraded to 1866MHz).

2. HDD: Not much you can do with RAM therefore you need faster HDD. You have 2 options

       (a) Add M.2 SATA SSD to your machine using

                 https://www.crucial.com/ssd/mx500/ct500mx500ssd4/ct17769833

                then use it as main drive and old HDD for storage

    (b) Replace slow HDD with a much faster 2.5" SSD using

               https://www.crucial.com/ssd/mx500/ct1000mx500ssd1/ct17769822

   Now, your choice

Regards.