Kid has a Windows PC that just started to run incredibly slowly. I mean 30 minutes to boot, and then tens of minutes after booting as it tries to have every boot service run very slowly.
My theory is an overloaded C drive, but the system crashes out before I can even get to Add/Remove program. I can’t seem to catch Safe Mode with F8 either.
Any advice?
Kevin,
Sounds more like the hard drive is dying. It’s possible that it’s completely full and has thus no caching capability, but usu. windows is smart about that. Can you check the hard drive (either booting from USB/CD and running a utility, or pulling the hard drive and checking it in another computer)?
If you need to build a bootable USB/CD to run utilities, check out the ones recommended here: 5 Bootable ISO's to Boot and Repair Your Computer for Free - MajorGeeks
I’ve used UBCD, but I suspect any of these would work. Others may know more and have better suggestions.
Aleck
Thanks! I’ll try that now.
Yeah, sounds like a dying boot drive IMO… Back up anything not already backed up!
One other thing to check would be USB devices. A long time ago I had a really slow boot problem that was fixed by removing something USB-connected (can’t remember what, alas) until after the computer had booted. So before panicking about the boot drive, at least try unplugging everything and see if that work. If so, add them back one by one.
Well I can’t get it to boot from the USB stick using UBCD. Unplugged all the other USB devices to check on Ginger’s note but no difference. Maybe a different option from Aleck links.
While it does seem like this is related to a dying C drive, I wonder - could this be caused by a boot drive that’s almost 100% full? My wife’s mac starts acting weird when she fills up her boot drive (granted, not boot-related issues but I theorized that maybe it’s trying hard to find swap space or some such?).
That’s my theory. Can’t get any of the boot tools to work since they presuppose a CD not USB and there is no such device. May have to try a Windows recovery USB but not sure that will boot. Still trying to get into Safe Mode…
Can you get into the BIOS?
I can get into Gigabyte Q-Flash which has access to the BIOS.
Well some kind of access anyway. Getting out of my depth here.
Kevin,
You should be able to use RUFUS or a similar tool to “burn” the image to the USB and make it bootable. I’m on a call and don’t have the time to look it up right now, but if you can’t make it work post back here and I’ll try to find directions later.
Aleck
If you can get into the BIOS, you should be able to specify to boot off the USB first. Sometimes, you can also see a hit F12 to select your boot device when the system first starts.
You can also try to shake loose some free space using the Disk Cleanup utility baked into Windows. Launch it by typing disk cleanup at the Windows menu. When it launches, click the ‘Clean Up Sytem Files’ button. Check as many boxes as you can that seem like they’ll free up the most space.
Thanks Aleck for the RUFUS suggestion. Trying that now. If I can get in and get access I’ll try mono’s trick first.
I read the thread title as "incredibly slow boat. Am disappoint.
I wish.
Still can’t see the USB boot even after RUFUS. I was able to activate Disk Cleanup, which was able to knock off 500MBs of crap. Still running too slow to run Add Remove Programs for more space.
Probably the hard drive at this point. Probably will get someone to look at it.
Thanks all for the help!
Since this is probably a somewhat older PC, and you can still boot into Windows, I’d clone the hard drive to a new drive. I’ll suggest a SATA drive since you may not have an NVME slot, or may prefer to skip the minor surgery of installing it.
You can grab this 1TB drive for $60 bucks. You can get a 500GB drive for $40 if you don’t need as much space.
You can definitely go cheaper, probably under $40 for a different 1TB drive, but Samsung provides free, easy to use cloning data migration software if you use one of their disks, and I’ve had a lot of success with it over the years.
Then get a $10 USB to SATA adapter.
Hook up the new drive via USB. Install and run the data migration softwae, and clone the existing drive to the new SSD. Then the only thing you’ll need to do is pull the two cables (SATA and SATA Power) out of the existing hard drive and plug them into the new drive. It should ‘just work’ and boot to the new drive.
Thanks, mono! Excellent advice.
It was rude of me to not follow up, sorry!
Put a new SSD in there, but wasn’t fully able to clone the old drive because the disc was too far gone-- turns out it was a HDD, so clear upgrade for the kiddo after some short-term redownloading pain.
For TheWombat:
Had to change out the boiler completely, but she’s back up to a fine 16-18 knots now on Full Ahead.
Great! Watch out for icebergs, though.
This is the kind of added value that keeps me reading miscellaneous hardware threads.