Ulverston Repair Cafe, March 2024

[[Ulverston Repair Cafe]].

Second month back after being away for a few.

Looked at a couple of slow laptops.

Laptop 1

A Dell Vostro. A bit of a long-term project for one of the other volunteers - today just backing up important files, which took about 2 hours running in the background.

Laptop 2

An Asus running Windows 10.

Reported issue

• Reported as had been slowing down for a while.
• But had recently started really creaking.

Work carried out

• At startup, Teams reports not having enough free space.
• This message also appeared at startup "instruction at … referenced memory at xxxx. The required data was not placed into memory because of an I/O error status of xxx Click on OK to to terminate the program".
• First thing, based off the messages, looked at available drive space.
  • Windows Explorer -> right-click C: -> Properties.
  • There was only 9Mb available.
  • Full drive space only 60Gb.
• Have a look for where the space is being used up.
  • Settings -> System -> Storage (How to see what’s taking up space on a hard drive on Windows 10 - Pureinfotech)
• Mostly apps and features. A few Gb on temporary files (mostly downloads folder). User documents only about 5Gb.
• Temporary files -> Cleared temporary files.
• Apps & features -> Uninstalled a few apps. (3 of which were different virus checkers.)
• After this, had 9Gb free.
• Installed AVG Free. (You have to pay for Windows Defender now? Oh - the free version is actually called Windows Security on Windows 10. Stay protected with Windows Security - Microsoft Support).
• Turned off some apps starting at startup.
  • Settings -> Apps -> Startup (How to Disable Startup Programs in Windows)
• Restarted.
  • Was forced to install some Windows updates which was annoying and wasted some time.
• Much faster at startup!
• Still not the speediest machine. Said that installing more memory and an SSD could possibly help, but that they were not easy to access.
• Wrote down instructions for checking space and removing unneeded files, and how to check startup apps periodically. Advised to run AVG scan regularly.