Windows 7 Slowness

As a follow on to my Vista slowness thread, here is one about Windows 7.

My Dad has an HP laptop with Windows 7. I tried to use it today to set something up in Thunderbird. Thunderbird took ages to load up (well over a minute), but when it did finally load, it was nice and snappy. Likewise, Firefox took way too long to load.

From what I gathered by looking at the Task Manager, it looked like the machine had ample RAM for these programmes.

Any ideas? The one significant thing I did notice was that it appeared to have Trusteer Rapport installed, which is known to cause problems with system performance (or at least it was a few years ago when I last encountered it).

I stopped using firefox a long time ago as it was becoming really slow to load and always wanted to update itself every bloody time it launched. It might have got better since then, perhaps?

My win 7 install on the HTPC is becoming unbearably slow - it takes an age for anything to load (especially Kodi or browsers) but similar to your observation they run OK when finally launched.

I'm gonna trash the whole install at some point and start with a fresh clean install. Does the slowness bother your dad? If not I'd recommend leaving it alone.

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It's blatantly from too much porn though :shades:

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I stopped using firefox a long time ago as it was becoming really slow to load and always wanted to update itself every bloody time it launched. It might have got better since then, perhaps?

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No! Last 3 times i use it, both asked me for updates... 3 times in the same week

I'm surprised you found Firefox slow to load. I've recently installed it on my 'new' Pentium 4 laptop and it loads in under 10 seconds. It loads in under 5 seconds on my Linux box.

I have noticed the automatic updates thing on my other Windows box, but I only use that every couple of months, so I wasn't surprised at it wanting to update itself. On this laptop, I've disabled automatic updates completely in Options/Advanced/Update. Firefox on my Linux box doesn't even have the option to update, as it is installed from the Debian repository.

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Does the slowness bother your dad? If not I'd recommend leaving it alone.

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He acknowledges that it is too slow, but he seems to work round it by setting the machine loading something up, then going to make a cup of tea.

This Windows 7 machine is back here for some maintenance. I've done away with the HP Bloatware, as well as AVG and some remnants of some McAffee stuff, and installed Microsoft Security Essentials.

It seems to run quite nicely now. Thunderbird still takes its time to load though for some reason.

I'm just running CCleaner to see what that does. I ran Windows Update last night and it tried to download about 1GB of updates, but half of them failed to install, and it looks like numerous other updates have failed over the years. I'll try and fix that later.

A backup and clean install might be better.

I was almost going to do that, but I decided I'd try and de-crap it first. Anyway, it seems to run more or less OK now.