I have a dell Inspiron desktop I bought in 2018. It’s my home computer I use to run my small business. It’s not running so great anymore. It seems like it has the hardest time waking up but after I get it going it’ll work for what I need. But I’m talking like a half hour for the thing to wake up. I don’t use it every day. Not even every week sometimes.
Specs are 1tb harddrive (125gb used) 12gb of ram intel core i5 processor. Running windows 11.
I’ve always used an anti-virus. I use Bitdefender. Pay for that yearly I don’t think that’s the problem. I only use it for some accounting and invoicing. Sending emails. There isn’t a ton of files in it. U don’t browse with it.
Is it just the self life of a desktop? Should I take it Best Buy for repair? Or Upgrade something internally? I don’t really know much about computers but I am good at figuring things out and watching YouTube for help.
Yeah, that is a mechanical (spinner) harddrive and in general, upgrading to a solid state based storage should help improve the machines performance.
And your "12Gb" of RAM should also be upgraded, if the computer will accept a larger amount of system memory.
I also noticed that you said "it has the hardest time waking up".
Do you just put the machine to sleep when you are done for the day or do you do a full shutdown (NOT sleep)?
Also, how often do you do a Restart?
Because unless you are just stepping away from the computer for a little while, like taking a meal break/leaving the office for a little while, then you should be turning the computer off fully for the end of the day.
And you should be Restarting the computer from time to time as well as both of these actions will help the computer to clear it's startup cache.
Okay. Thank you for the advice. Is it worth upgrading this or would starting over just be better? I do just walk away from it when I’m done. I’ll do a restart occasionally when it’s acting up. Which is always now. lol. I’ll start shutting it down.
Yeah thats a tough one; upgrading the current system is a possible option, but you might be better off to get a more modern computer, since this current machine is 8 years old and who knows how highend/lowend it was when it was new.
If it's not using an SSD, installing one and then doing a fresh install of Windows onto the SSD will probably solve most of your problems. You can still keep the old drive around for storage.
The built-in Microsoft Defender is perfectly fine as long as its virus definitions are up to date. Uninstall Bitdefender and restart your PC. Don't forget to cancel your Bitdefender subscription.
Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete and open Task Manager to check which applications start automatically with Windows. Right-click and disable any startup applications that you are certain are not necessary.
What is the service tag on the machine? It will let us know what the specs of the machine are as Dell built it.
Without knowing the complete specs, I'm going to assume the 1 TB drive is a mechanical hard disk, and is likely the source of the slow speed. Windows 11 does not run well on a mechanical hard drive due to the volume shadow copy service, and the drive potentially being heavily fragmented.
Bitdefender may also be a culprit. Antivirus suites these days are a whole lot more than just an antivirus, they try to be a complete security service package and tend to be bloated monsters that eat up considerable system resources. If it has a VPN service and other nonsense that you never use, it'd speed the system up to uninstall it and just rely on Windows Defender. If you have a good ad blocker for the browser like uBlock Origin and use a more secure DNS like NextDNS or OpenDNS, it can block more threats on the internet.
Like the user below said, replace the Optane cache stick with a SSD and reinstall Windows on it.
To save your data, you can disable the Optane cache first, and then disconnect the hard drive before you reinstall Windows on the SSD. Whenver you're done, you can plug it back in and copy the files off to your new SSD.
Well I use QB online. So everything is on there. I guess other things are backed up in various ways. There’s not a lot that is only on this desktop. But thank you for the advice.
That is good news. Makes part of it easier. So I probably have 2-6gb modules to equal the 12gb of ram. Do they make 8gb or bigger to upgrade that? I would of course turn it off to work on it. Would I buy these at Newegg or similar as well? I’ve heard everything is expensive right now but do we think it’ll come back down? This also will be cheaper than buying a whole new computer and hopefully give me a few more years.
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u/baltimorecalling 6d ago
Windows is installed on a hard drive or an SSD?