Have an 8 1/2 year old ASUS laptop that runs ridiculously slow. Like 90 seconds to open a Word document and long stretches b4 web pages change while surfing.
I backed up all that I needed and did a full factory reset but that didn’t help.
I’ve downloaded heaps of movies over the years from PirateBay and watched quite a bit of sports via streaming, both of which may have introduced viruses to the system.
My Qs are: Can an ASUS repair store fix this issue so that I’m not waiting forever while working or while online? And if so, about how much would it cost? Thanks
You would have to contact ASUS to ask the price or if they even will try to fix it, 8.5 y.o. could be considered beyond economic repair.
Have you considered switching to Linux? its not as difficult as it used to be.
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Your laptop may be running too hot due to hardware issues such as CPU paste needing to be replaced.
I had that happen on a Toshiba. Turned out (probably) to be due to a Russian Mafia “Cuckoo” virus, detected once by Clamwin, the clunky antivirus from Linux. Could have been a false alarm but consistent with suspicious network traffic.
Evaded all attempts to sweep it, and eventually I formatted the hard disk, which seemed to get it.
In the interim I ran LXLE off a write-protected SD card, and rather liked it.
Currently doing the same on an ASUS with partially cracked windows, and intend to install it once I’ve re-partitioned the disk. If I can repair it I’ll keep Windows in case I want to run the odd program, but probably wont use it much.
The critical thing is whether you can get the machine to boot off a USB/SD card. Doesn’t seem to be possible on the GF’s shiny new Fujitsu, which I could have sworn I tested for when we bought it. DUH!
Re running hot, could be fixable by removing fluff from the cooling fan and vents
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In Taiwan, an 8.5 year old laptop would be considered deeply offensive, involving unbearable loss of face.
Almost as bad (and thus good) as a 38 year old car.
If it’s that old, does it have an HDD? If it does, you could replace it with an SSD for fairly cheap and see a marked improvement.
One way to speed up an old equipment is to replace Windows with Lubuntu.
Get the newest LTS (long term support) version, 24.04.
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I can fix it. But I wont be back in Taiwan till the 5th
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Couple of points about moving to Linux, from a clearly non expert perspective.
Ventoy allows you to run multiple applications from a single USB/SD straight from downloadable .iso files, so you dont have to mess with problemmatic and horribly counterintuitive “.iso burning” applications, which generally also require you to format the whole thing when installing, unless you jump through some rather complex hoops
I’ve got about half a dozen .isos on a 64G write protected SD card so far and only one of them (Norton Rescue Disk) hasn’t worked. Menus are a bit “dead end” prone but not too bad by Unix standards.
Also worked to run the Microsoft “raw” installation IOS from, apart from it failing on the first attempt when I selected “British English”. I suspected they didn’t mean it, and so it proved. Ünited States International", whatever TFT means, completed OK.
OTOH ｆｓｃ ／ｓｃａｎｎｏｗ ｓａｙｓ ｉｔ ｆｏｕｎｄ ｃｏｒｒｕｐｔｅｄ ｆｉｌｅｓ， ｗｈｉｃｈ ｓｈｏｕｌｄｎｔ ｒｅａｌｌｙ ｈａｐｐｅｎ ｗｉｔｈ ａｎ ＯS installed 5 minutes ago, Might just reformat the disk
I used RescueZilla, which runs from the SD card, to back up my Windows partitions, which everyone tells you to do. This avoids trying to navigate horribly obscure Linux command line utilities. Not very capable (no incremental or differential backups AFAIK) but fine for a one-off and fairly easy to drive.
Of course I havn’t actually restored the backup, which is the acid test, but hopefully I wont need to.
Years ago running stuff directly off a USB or SD card for an extended periods of time would sometimes have weird hangups that ended in a kernel crash . However, the USB protocol is much faster now, so maybe that’s all fixed.
Have you been updating the software? At some point your hardware is too old to run new software quickly
- Remove HDD.
- Install SSD.
- Max RAM.
- Re-Install Windows 10.
Here’s one of my old set ups. It’s a couple months short of 11 years old, but with my upgrades, it screams. Good fuck around notebook computer.
DELL Latitude E7440 [Released November 2013]
Processor: Intel Core i7-4600U @ 2.10 GHz
SSD: 1TB mSATA
SSD: 1 TB 2.5" SATA
RAM: 16 GB
O/S: Windows 10 Professional
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Let’s see… Has it always been that slow? Or dud it get slower gradually? Or quickly?
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Ｄoes it already have an SSD. If it does, make sure you backup all important data from the SSD. NAND retention is only 10 years, and you are probably nearing the endurance limit if you’ve been torrenting to your SSD.
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If it’s 8 years old, it probably has an SSD.
Ooer.
Re-installing Windows seems to have disappeared the legacy pseudo-BIOS. I can still get it to boot off a USB port by jumping through a lot of menus within Windows UEFI settings, but its a lot of F-ing around and there’s no persistence, so you have to go through Windows every time.
Tricky bastards.
Didn’t know they could do that.
If this is true it means if Windows dies again, which is very likely, I wont be able to load an alternative.
“Windows Boot Manager” is now the only option listed in the UEFI firmware settings. The other one, which booted off USB, is gone.
It was a fairly long string and I dont remember what it was.
FUCKERS!
WOW! Thanks for tall the responses. I’m gonna look into an SSD to replace the HDD. Much appreciated for all the pointers. The slowing down was a gradual process over the last couple years.
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Have you done the basic disk and systemfile maintenance like chkdsk , defrag, scannow, RestoreHealth, and probably other stuff that I cant offhand remember but could lookup?
The disk maintenance stuff should be automated in recent OS (dunno offhand when they started doing that), but if it was turned off for any reason your disk might need some fettling.
I’ll look into this. Thanks Ducked
Then it could be a couple of things, which can be checked for:
- Cooling system degraded, like: dusty, fan not working well, thermal grease dried out, …
This you could check with a tool like throttlestop, simply post a screenshot here taken during a very slow time. That tool works best with intel CPUs, so if yours is AMD then I’d look up other tools.
- Some kind of background programms, tools, malware etc. eating up computing power.
This can be checked with the task manager, seems how many % CPU time is used by what programs or processes
- Same but with memory, something using up your memory could force the OS to keep swapping to disk a lot, slowing down more and more (especially with old HDD instead of SSD).
Checking the above (temperatures, CPU usage, memory usage) should give hints already in which direction to check.
Since you already reinstalled or reset, it’s less likely that there are any unknown/unwanted processes. Maybe simply the OS got more greedy over time, and you’ve been near the minimum needed speed/memory from the beginning? We’ll see.