LFC#106 - Servicing - Intro on how to make slow computers fast again

how long drives welcome to let's fix computers today we're doing the atom an IT service so this laptop we've got here this is a HP Pavilion g6 series and it came in with symptoms that it was not starting stalling running horribly slow etc etc we've run hardware tests on this and found there's nothing wrong with the hardware it's not a failing hard drive or anything like that it just needs a good service so I generally recommend to clients to get their computer serviced once a year or so I tell people there are a lot like cars so I'm going to show you exactly how I do that on this laptop now bear in mind there may be a lot of jump cuts in this video because servicing laptops takes time so we're going to have to try and condense this down the first thing I do is open up task manager and just have a general look at what state this thing is in and so right so straight away you can see that in task manager the CPUs sitting on a hundred percent so the laptop is not idling which is the first issue we've got here so let's have a quick look down task managers just to see what is loading up a CPU it looks like we got several sources here and all of them are AVG so so the first thing we're going to do is get rid of AVG that's probably going to fix our idling problem straight away now the AVG uninstaller is really ropey so what we're going to do we're going to get the AVG removal tool which will strip AVG off of this computer a lot quicker so I've got to get this connected to the internet so we're going to join our Wi-Fi network good grief this thing as a brick okay we're actually going to go yeah we're going to download this tool on another computer is going to be a lot faster okay so we're going to Google search for AVG removal tool now this is an official tool from the obg website so we don't have to use any dodgy programs for this ABG are good enough to provide us with the means to get rid of their rubbish we go download that and we're going to shove it onto a flash drive back so page X because we always say fear checked our class drives all right let's get rid of that now we could probably solve this huge hi this of 100% CPU load issue by trying to kill AVG but I actually think it's going to be faster to run the energy removal tool and let that shut AVG down and it is going to be to try and kill these processes because trying to kill antivirus processes is a nightmare because antivirus runs at a system user level which is one of those really bizarre above admin levels is kind of like root and that means that it's really difficult to terminate it and if it itself has crashed it's very difficult to recover it which is why antivirus has a nasty habit of just completely paralyzing the whole system when it goes wrong and this is the reason why once we've removed AVG we will be using Windows Defender because Windows Defender is the one antivirus that doesn't doesn't suffer these issues because it's actually developed as part of Windows not as an add-on ten minutes into the recording and we haven't achieved anything yet alright we're going to get AVG remover onto the desktop because running apps like this from flash drive is generally a bad idea you want to try and get the removal tool onto the local Drive and run it from there just because otherwise if the flash drive gets knocked loose or something like that halfway through you're going to have half of an ABG installation on the computer and that's going to make everything even worse if it's possible to get worse than what we currently have right let's see if this is going to work I'm just doing mouse clicks and enter presses at the moment because I don't dare try and double click on anything ok on AVG removal we're just going to go ahead and continue and we just gonna let that grind through now right 13:06 40 minutes after we begun we're going to restart its yeah the ABG remover is still nowhere near done kind of thing but it looks like hopefully it's going to boot in the system without AVG running which means we're actually going to you know be able to operate a computer net Allah we won't be sitting at 100% cpu load all the time okay so we have finally gotten rid of AVG so AVG is no longer on the system and the system is actually starting to respond let's check top manager and see if we're actually idling properly now so fat chance about alright so yeah we it's better but we still not idling properly we've still got very high disk usage and we still have some AVG stuff running in the background so what we're going to how much I need you if we got here oh that's not bad it's just those couple of apps at the top so what we're going to do we're just going to run that AVG removal tool again and we're just going to run it again rinse and repeat until we've got no more AVG okay right so finally AVG is gone however you'll notice we're still not idling we're still sitting at 100% CPU so let's scroll down and find out what's causing that now all right there's one Windows modules installer that's Windows Update so Windows Update is having a hissy fit and now it has been trying to install Windows Update while I've been using it so what we're going to do we're just going to flat kill Windows Update and clear its cache just so we can get a clean install of that and in fact come to think of it if I can just get to the Settings app we probably need to do the creator's build update on this laptop so we're just going to flat-out kill the Windows Update and do the build update manually and then that will just take away any needs that yeah we don't have creators update on that right so what we're going to do we're going to get ourselves an admin command prompt so I'm a right-click on start command prompt tab and we're going to do next are windows update automatic updates server enter Windows Update service is stopping this may or may not kill those installers are already running right when does update service could not be stopped let's repeat the command it's still starting or stopping ok right what we're going to do we're going to drop back into safe mode again and what we're going to go into safe mode and we're going to delete the Windows Update folder so I'll get back to you guys once we're back into safe mode alright so because I've got no HDMI output I'll just quickly tell you what I've just done once again I helped pound shift and boot it into recovery mode and I've opened up a command prompt and I've deleted C windows software distribution so this is the windows update cache folder that holds all of the pending windows updates so i've deleted that so we reset the windows update system so that means when i reboot the computer there will be no pending updates and we need to start again so that will give us a nice clean start okay we have rebooted again let's head back into task manager and see if we are finally making progress oh it's better we've still got high disk usage the CPU is actually not all over the place at where it is all over the place but it's not sitting at 100% anymore right where's the disk usage coming from this might just be because the laptop is still loading up yeah there's no single thing here this is just lots of things adding up so that is probably going to sort itself out shortly is the CPU going to come down again I think it will right ok I think we're OK to keep going now so let's actually move on to the servicing routines and we'll just let that take care of itself I have a plan for the of that but we'll come we'll come to that in and there so firstly what we're going to do now is we're going to look through everything that's running on startup so if I have to start up here you can see we got a crapload of stuff running here we've still got some old ABG stuff here however because of the program folders for it I've been duped those are neither here nor back so to deal with all of this stuff we need to go through the registry and through task scheduler so let's start in the registry so I'm going to hit start run and type in registry regedit sorry and we're going to go to H key current user software microsoft windows currentversion run and in there we'll find everything that is running on startup just for this user now in this instance is just one drive let's see if they are using onedrive they are not signed into onedrive yeah there's no account connected so we can kill onedrive they're not using that goodbye right so now we're going to climb back up to the top and now we're going to go to the same place but in local machine so local machine software microsoft windows currentversion run okay right so we've got some AVG stuff we'll come back to that in a sec right BT Broadband Desktop help we don't need that the LogMeIn user interface we don't need that because they're not using anyone for a remote support right now synaptics trackpad enhancer that is providing extra functionality for the trackpad that's a good thing we're going to leave that alone IDT is the sound card drivers so this as in the audio effects for the sound card now by default all of the effects are switched off and no one uses the audio effects so we're going to get rid of that then finally the bottom we've got Windows Defender now if we get rid of that that just gets rid of the shield from the bottom right of the screen it doesn't actually stop Windows Defender so on my computer I would remove that but on a customer computer I leave it there because the customer likes to see a little shield in the bottom right confirming that their antivirus is working so we can leave that alone right let's see if it's going to let us delete these AVG entries is problem not yeah those are not going to delete because they're protected files so we're going to have to mess about and trying to leave those manually I wonder if I can modify permissions on those no that is going to be a problem I'm going to come back to that later that is going to require really advanced messing about to get rid of that and we don't need to do that as part of this service we've deleted the ABG program files so these things are not running anything is just clutter at this point so I'll delete that off-camera because it's going to be a pain in the backside and you guys don't need to see that right we can climb back up to the top the last place we need to check in here is local machine software round 64 32 note these are 32-bit applications that are running on startup so we're going to go once again into microsoft windows currentversion run and here we'll find any 32-bit application so we've got another ADT one you can let me delete you yes you are cool right cyberlink power to go this will automatically launch side link if they insert a video DVD which we don't need they can do that themselves if they want HP cool sense does nothing to do with fan control but it doesn't actually work properly the fan will look after itself HP quick launch this handles volume controls brightness controls things like that however it is obsolete as of Windows 10 so we can go ahead and delete that remote control 10 that again is CyberLink software that I can go and start catalyst control center we don't need that because the catalyst control center doesn't need to run on startup if we want that we can get it just by right-clicking on the desktop and going to amy catalyst control center so that's that we've cleared that up right we're finished in the registry let's get out of that now we're going to go to computer management I'm going to right click on the debt on the start button and go to computer management and we're going to head into the task scheduler okay so we're going to drop down the first section of task scheduler and select task scheduler library and this will show us anything that is scheduled to run on startup ok we look quite a lot here so quickly I'm always through this to see if there's anything important there so we can figure out what stuff is either by the name and description or by having a look under actions so here we go this one that has a really weird name we can instantly see the values by AVG because it's launching something in program data AVG so we're going to have go ahead and delete those two straightaway as check your own is also yep goodbye okay right how about so that's the Adobe up data we don't need that to be running in the background whoops antivirus end up at us another AVG one goodbye see look at this the even that AG removal tool is garbage whatever right another cyber link app I said we don't need these to be running in the background the browser choice screen this is an old legacy thing from the Windows 7 days this is probably a Windows 7 or 8 update this is no longer required so that can go away the Google updated the Google our data actually works so I leave that alone it always has two entries though I leave the multiple triggers defined one because the other one this one repeats every hour which is a little bit aggressive we don't need it to run every hour once a day is fine right H peace see cement scheduler that is some HP software the HP software is all Daleks and we're going to get rid of that Mirage agent again that CyberLink stuff this is to do with the webcam drivers it allows you to put special effects see the soup your turn on your webcam we don't need that delete goodbye get rid of that onedrive launches we've already established we're not using onedrive goodbye we're getting rid of it optimize optimize what optimized Start menu cache files this is disabled anyway and so that doesn't need to be that so that can go goodbye Windows the Start menu generally looks after itself so we're not worried about that smart PC fix right that's junk we're so we're gonna get rid of you synaptics touchpad enhancements again that is two dudes touchpad drivers I'm actually going to delete that because this is already running from the registry so we already have a start up entry for that so it doesn't need to be in scheduled tasks and then finally use a feed synchronization this is to do with synchronizing RSS feeds atom feeds stuff like that across user account we don't need it it can go goodbye there we go BAM that is a lot of stuff we've just cleared up so we can close this now finally if we head back into task manager and start out as you can see we taken all so much stuff these last four items that are left here these were sitting in the registry though and we knowingly did not delete them which is why they're still there so there's no further action required here again I'm going to deal with those AVG things later on so with fine now let's do a update sort of reboot and let's just see how we're getting on I'm just gonna go ahead and just delete the Aug remove it X we're finished with that and then we will reboot and see what that task manager looks like okay let's see how that task manager is looking I want to see a nice more stable Idol okay it's slightly better not massively it's more consistent at least and now this disk usage there's going to be programs that are sitting there trying to do optimizations and stuff like that in the background oh there we go it's kind of now the only way to fix this is to leave the computer to idle for a long period of time so I usually do that at the end of the service when I finish doing everything I turn off all the power saving features on the laptop so it doesn't go to sleep and I just leave it to run overnight so we're going to get to that later on so again we with seeing improvements here it's starting to come down but the real proof of the pudding will be after we've finished the service there so I'm not panicking about that the point is the laptop is already feeling more responsive while I can close that and I can reopen task manager and as you can see it's actually loading up in a timely fashion now I'm not having to screen cut to cut through that loading time anymore and that disk is starting to come down so we're starting to make progress right so the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go through the programs list and get rid of anything that that I don't want to be there so first item on the chopping block is going to be the HP support assistant down here just because that's garbage and I don't want it to be there because it just maxed the customer to do things that they don't need to do so we're going to go ahead and do a quick uninstalling spree we're also going to look for anything else that just doesn't need to be there so I'm talking about toolbars I'm talking about junk we're computer cleaners that kind of thing I'm fairly passive at this stage I only get rid of really obvious stuff so let's have a quick hunt AVG stuff let's just see if that's going to disappear if I try and click on uninstall no those I'm going to remove themselves so again I'll have to manually remove those later because the AVG removal tool didn't so fine whatever BT Broadband desk Oh black and gold right okay so the beauties there HP support assistant we're going to get rid of you this is fairly clean actually there's not a huge amount here that needs to go let's just keep scrolling while that does its thing whoops oh god oh god now asking this computer to do more than one thing at a time is asking too much you all right so we've got a lot of garbage on this laptop that as you can see is not uninstalling properly so we're going to we're gonna install those other bits using another program in a moment so we're not going to panic about that right now and there's a load of stuff as you can see toolbars and stuff that needs to go however I'm guessing AVG's removed a lot of it as malware however it hasn't uninstalled it properly so we've got to do that ourselves so we're going to come back to that in a moment once we've done some other stuff so the next thing on the list then I'm going to I'm going to tidy up the desktop so for this we're going to sort out these desktop icons we're gonna sort out the start barbing and sort out the system tray so we're going to drop in to personalise and we're going to now these customizations are my personal preferences however I believe they work best for the customer so firstly we're going to go into themes and desktop icons and we're going to turn on the computer and user folder desktop icons because that makes it nice and easy for the user to find their stuff because common users are very site oriented you need to put things in plain sight so when the customer is looking for their data if there is a folder on the desktop with their name on it they can be like that's me that's my stuff so you don't hide anything away and so we're also going to go into Start options and turn off start suggestions that's get the get rid of some of the out there adverse then we're going to go into taskbar I'm going to scroll down and we're going to say show all icons in the notification area which gets rid of the arrow down here so there's never anything hidden so we can always see what's going on and as you can see now we've actually tidied stuff up there's actually nothing down there anyway so that we don't need to hide icons so that's that then finally we're going to hide the Cortana search bot because it is well we're going to change it to an icon because it's completely redundant at any given time you can click start and start searching for stuff anyway so the Cortana search bar is completely redundant and just takes up a lot of space on start bar especially when you've got a small screen so finally now we're going to tidy up some of these icons so we're going to unpin some of the stuff down here that we don't care about we're going to unpin the store we're going on can edge we're going on pin this HP rubbish let me see Windows mail are they using Windows mail they have it set up for Gmail and it's in use and we're going to block that out in post because it was a load of personal data and the snipping tool we'll leave that there because they might be using that what's the vas that generic icon Google Earth it doesn't look like they're using that can unpin will leave an icon for that on the desktop they don't really need a look at Start bar icon for that so that's sorted right now let's do the desktop so firstly I'm going to change these view to medium icons which makes them a bit easier to handle and we're going to go through these so we don't need a shortcut to the webcam we don't need a shortcut to Adobe Reader because that runs when you open a PDF game Snapfish ebay nor an installation files that's all rubbish that can all go oh wait the Google Earth we're going to keep that we'll just bring that back okay BT Broadband Desktop health we don't need that connected music power by universal music group we don't need that CyberLink media suite we don't need that alright so now we're going to sort by item type which gives us a nice logical layout so we've got this PC in the top left which is just covered by my face then we've got recycle bin and then we got the user folder so we have a nice logical layout that's clear and easy to understand now the user is actually likely to use these desktop icons because they can see what's there they can understand what's there whereas when you've got loads of shortcuts that are not being used the customer is literally just going to be like I don't know what that is and ignoring so that's the idea here we're trying to make it easy enough to understand that the customer will actually use it so that's that now the Start menu we're going to give this exactly the same treatment we're going to unpin everything that just doesn't need to be there and kin what the customer might actually want to use so let's just go through a nun pain all of this pre-loaded rubbish that comes with the computer you okay so now we're left with what we think that the user is actually going to want I'm going to add the user folder so they can quickly get to that files so we're going to pin that to the start and now we're going to then we're going to rearrange all of this into a nice tidy layout so let me see we also have chrome on this so we're going to pin crime everywhere in that to the start and also pin it to the taskbar so we're going to stick crime up in the top left and then I'm going to put will keep mail next to it and then photos can go here the photos is not necessary but it's a nice active tile that makes the Start menu look pretty which is why I always tend to leave it in place and the weather app the weather app can go because then we can have the calendar that and now we can have two rows of office and the other stuff we have there so this PC Google Earth and the users home folder now we're going to rename that to start there we go now we've got a nice logical Start menu let's just swap those around so we have a nice little sort of spiral thing going on here okay that looks nice and that looks clear and easy to understand everything that is there is very obvious in its function so again there's no there's no crap there's not a lot of animating stuff nice and clear and easy to understand so that's our Start menu tidied up right so next thing I'm just going to quickly check on the notifications so we've got some security stuff going on there that's because we've removed a DG so we're going to clear those open Windows Defender and just make sure that that is happy so turn everything on close that and we're going to go ahead and do the quick scan just to make sure the Windows Defender is happy and so yeah this is kind of I don't really want to be doing scans right now because the hard drive really needs defragmenting which means these scans are going to take a longer than they need to but if we do this Windows Defender will be happy and I don't need to do anything else with defender so I will come back once that scan is finished okay right we're back is the next it's the next day now so yeah 24 hours out or whatever anyway so this thing is finished doing that it's finished doing that antivirus scan so Windows Defender in the bottom right here is now happy that saying we're all protected so we've got antivirus back and that's fine it also had some time to idle now it didn't get all night because the battery ran out but it did get several hours of idle time which meant that he could finish doing those background tasks and things that were jamming up the CPU so as you can see in task manager we're now actually idling properly we head over to performance here we can see there's a little bit of jumping about here in there now this CPU is never going to flatline properly for us because it's too slow for that now that is when this EQ is idling it's going to drop down to low speeds and at those slow speeds this light is a little bit of use is going to make it go over and throw up light a high CPU usage so it's going to spike now and it's going to happen however as you can see we're actually getting a nice a nice idle chatter at the bottom instead of sitting at like plus 50 percent load all the time and the hard drive is chilled down now that's flatlining for us so that's good so we're actually making progress now so at this point the next thing I'm going to do is a Windows build update now this computer is currently running the anniversary update I can check by typing by doing windows are for run and typing in wimba for win version and that's going to tell us we're on version 1607 which is the anniversary update and now we're actually the latest version is the creators update which came out recently now installing the creators update isn't going to improve the performance of this computer however we have to understand that when you do a bit at some point this computer will automatically do the build update it will come down through windows through Windows Update and it will be forcibly installed because Windows 10 has a very aggressive Windows Update which is a good thing but that's another discussion and however when that build update is installed it is going to make that's all over the harddrive in terms of fragmentation now we'll talk a bit more about fragmentation a bit later on but the point is if I don't install this build update it's going to do it itself later on down the line and that is going to fragment the hard drive and slow the laptop down so it's better that I do it now before I defrag the computer then I give this computer back to the client and the build up they do itself this time in a month or something and then the customer is going to write OS will slow again after doing that big windows update so we're going to do that ourselves so I need to get my Windows 10 flash drive now you can of course download you can download this yourself from the Microsoft website you can do it through Windows Update I have got it downloaded on here to make one of these flash drives you need to download the Windows 10 media creation tool you run that it will download the latest version of Windows 10 and put it onto a flash drive for you and that allows you to reinstall windows on computers and be you can also do inline build updates so what we're going to do were going to plug that in we're going to go to this PC scroll down to our USB flash drive and we're just going to run setup.exe straight off of that flash drive and that's going to start the windows installer now if you boot from the flash drive it will do what's known as a repair install which means it will move the current window tints talk to a windows.old folder and make a new one that's not what we want to do if we run setup.exe from within windows it will do what I refer to as an inline update which means it actually updates the existing install instead of moving into making a new one so it's very important that we run this from inside windows not boot from the flash drive so what this is going to do now is once it's gone through this preparing thing the first stage of the update is to copy the all of the update files from the flash drive onto the hard drive then it will reboot into the Windows setup and do the actual update so I'm just going to fast-forward through all of this it's pretty straightforward I'm just going to go ahead and do next next next a lot of times the only other stipulation is it's going to ask me in a minute if I want to download updates we're going to say no to that there we go because we're going to do Windows Update after this anyway I just want to get on to the new build of Windows then we'll worry about updates so off we go you okay right our bill that date is done let's just quickly whiz through the first run so we can leave locational because that's useful we're going to turn off all the rest of this send information to Microsoft stuff and now I don't care about Cortana okay welcome to the turn creators updates go away don't care right so if we do Windows R and win ver again we will now see that we are now on version 1703 thanks guy pea-green um cool so now that is done we're going to go ahead and run Windows Update so we're going to make our way to settings Windows Update now the thing about Windows Update is if there is nothing pending installation it will say there are no available updates but this is most likely a lie so what we're going to do we're going to go into update and we're going to keep spamming that Update button until like two or three times it said no there are no more updates so we're going to see it says here nowadays well we're going to check anyway and surprise surprise there are updates to install so we're going to cycle this round we're going to keep it in check for updates until we click check for updates and it comes back again saying no there are no updates so we're going to keep that going back and forth until it's actually done it all right ignore the clock on the laptop it totally we totally didn't run into the weekend and have to leave it in here for a few days anyway we've now done all the windows update so it's installed updates object check for updates again and it's come back saying you're still up to date so we've definitely got all the updates now so with the Windows updates installed we're pretty much done with the tidying up so now we're going to run a couple of clean up apps on this thing they're just going to finish the job so there's three of them that I use let's just expand this out and so I'm going with my flash drive here that I've got plugged in and go to my toolkit and we're going to use our logics defrag ccleaner and malwarebytes anti-malware to finish this off so I'm going to copy those on to route C now obviously you can install these from anywhere I don't install them from a flash drive because everything seems to take a long time when you install from a flash drive so I copy them onto the hard drive and by leaving them in route C we achieve two things firstly I don't need to worry about forgetting to delete the install them and secondly this is a subtle warranty sticker and if a computer comes in and I see these three and these three installers on route C I know that it's one that I've probably serviced in the past and the date modified on those also tells me when I last looked at it as well so it's a nice little hint that you've seen that computer before so we're going to start out with ccleaner because obviously we don't want to bother doing a virus scan or a defrag on temporary files we're going to remove all of those first and then we'll start running our scans so let's get C cleaner installed and I'm going to unplug my flash drive because Windows Defender is complaining because there's viruses on it which is a half-truth I don't have actual viruses on my flash drive I just have certain programs there's some anti viruses might viewers unsavory right we don't want a desktop shortcut we don't want context menu items and we don't want to check for updates automatically install okay so we're going to do the cleaner actions and the registry actions on this so I'm going to go ahead and say it a run ccleaner yes we are ok with deleting files so this doesn't do anything to really speed up the computer per se as I say we're just removing the amount of stuff that we need to defrag and it's also just it's a nice just tidy up of the laptop to be honest is housekeeping ok so there's another three gigs of data that we don't need to do anything with so we're going to run the registry cleaner these I just kind of do for the sake of it I don't believe that registry cleaners have any meaningful impact on the computer and the ccleaner one there are some people to go or never use registry cleaners they damage the computer or something like that I've never seen the ccleaner registry cleaner caused problems and there are and there are other ones that I believe do but the ccleaner one never had issues with it so I just run it anyway because I can and so this is just going to remove any junk from the registry that doesn't need to be there and that does just mean that there's just you know it just makes the registry that little bit smaller in file size which you never know it might improve performance slightly but probably not really right the last thing we're going to do is we're going to go into monitoring and turn off see cleaners monitoring because the problem with cleanup tools like this is if you leave them running in the background they are going to themselves create as much of a footprint as they are removing from the system so use these things as cleaners not resident programs a resident program being one that is running in the background all the time we just use these as a cleanup tool nothing else right that's done so now we're going to fire up our logics defrag and now before we do that I'm going to run disk cleanup because we did a build update on this computer and so there is going to be a Windows to old folder here and that's probably going to be about 10 gigs or so so we can also get rid of that so I just searched for disk cleanup and I'm going to run it as administrator and you can also get to that by going through the disk properties but if you run as administrator straight away slightly faster so we'll let that do a scan and then that's going to remove some more temporary files and some old system files and windows windows update files that don't are not needed anymore all right there we go so we just selected everything in there there's nothing that we need and we're going to throw up another 21 gigs of data so not is that another 21 gigs of free hard drive space which we don't really need but whatever it's another 20 gigs that we don't need to defrag in a minute alright so our disk cleanup is done this cleanup does a silent exit when it's finished so that's why it hasn't come up with anything else so let's just refresh this computer there we go 630 gigs free right ok so let's start up our logic defrag so when the reason why I use our logics defrag is them it's a third party defrag that balances that bounces performance and effectiveness now with most D fraggers it's all the game of how long it takes versus how effective they are now for example piriform defraggler is a very effective defrag but it's agonizingly slow but windows defrag is reasonably quick but is very ineffective so our logics defrag provides a really good balance of performance and effectiveness it is a very effective defrag ER and it is actually very quick as well most hard most laptops it will generally get through within an hour I have found unless there is like huge amounts of data on the laptop so what we're going to do we're going to select just C Drive and we're going to select defrag and optimize from the job down there and would kick that off so I always use the portable version of our logics because unfortunately the Installer has a nasty habit of trying to load a load of them adware another junk on to your computer whereas the portable version is just the defrag and nothing else so always get the portable one so that's going to go through and analyze the drive now and this is going to be the most effective part of the service this is the part where everything is going to come together now everything that I've done up to this point has more or less been preparation for the defrag and what we've been doing is reducing the amount of stuff going on in the background on the computer we've been reducing the overheads to get the general CPU usage down the laptop doesn't feel fast yet because the hard drive is fragmented to hell and that means that everything loads very slowly however if I just defragged it it would speed up slightly but because the CPU would be all over the show we wouldn't really gain the best benefit from that whereas because we've now got a beautiful flatlining CPU low ram usage when we go ahead and defrag the hard drive this thing is going to feel really quick so let's leave that to crack on you all right our Defrag is done so as you can see we've got a nice solid block of blue at the top well we've got some bits of growth at here if we have a look at these this is stuff like the hibernation file there's probably the page file in there somewhere there's a page file and there'll be a couple of other system files things like that if you need to condense the hard drive down or if you're trying to do some other special stuff it is possible to delete and/or move those files but it's a pain in the backside and we have no need to actually do that on a standard service so we don't leave those alone we're not bothered about them at all however if you do need to there are means and ways of fixing that however all of our actual user data is all nicely collected up in the top-left of the drive so it's nice and optimized and it will be quick to access so that's that done so last time item of business now is a virus scan so we're going to use malwarebytes anti-malware 3 for this let's just run through the installer for this my advice is a very effective scanner with the exception of like one or two specific cases I have always found this to be sort of more or less the only scanner you really need to run and the only time where this has not been enough as been on kik has been in cases where the computer is in a really really bad way and if your computer is in a really bad way for viruses and you've got rookie's and all of that quite frankly just backup and reinstall windows is the only way to be sure and you know unless you have a really really pressing reason not to reinstall windows and generally speaking if malware vice doesn't detect it is probably not worth worrying about and so the one thing I do do though is once we've run this scan I do just have a quick look around the browser's and just check that they're behaving as I expect them to so we'll get to that in just a moment once we run through this scan so Mauer base 3 comes in a 14-day trial version so the first thing I do is I end that trial and convert it into a free license so we go into the settings and we click deactivate premium trial and this will change it over on to the always free version and so this just means I can leave malwarebytes installed on this computer and it's not going to complain about anything after that 14-day trial has expired so we'll just give that a moment because it has to think about it there we go married is on always free so head back to the dashboard we'll just check let me see let's just check this actually downloaded the updates right there we go that's just downloading some updates while it does that I'm going to right click on this icon down here and just say don't start with Windows because we don't want like like with them CCleaner malwarebytes is a great scanner but if you leave it running in the background is footprint is going to be at least the same size as the gain you've got from scanning in the first place now I have considered using malwarebytes as an actual anti-malware program by an actual antivirus per se I'm not worried about the version upgrade is just just detection just did yeah I'm not worried about the upgrades just definitions is all we need so yeah I have considered using this as actual antivirus but to be honest and Windows Defender does a good enough job as it is and realistically if you do encounter viruses on the computer you're going to need to open this up and run a scan anyway so there's not really any pressing need for it to run in the background just just open it up and do a scan if you think there's a problem with the computer so let's let that crack on and do its thing ok right our scan is done we found 356 threats so now you might say to yourself alright that's terrible look at all that stuff most of this is just trash basically it's nothing really to be concerned about let's have a quick scroll through here and see what we've actually got though so on so first we've got a lot of puppers so when we've got Yong to optimizer pro smart PC so these are those make your PC faster things that we were seeing on the add/remove programs and previously when we were looking and now again about 356 number isn't concerning Meeks as you can see we've got one two three four five six seven eight eight entries just for yon two despite that so that's eight that's eight of that 256 which is all the same thing basically so we're going to see the same as we scroll down we're going to see a lot of entries that are all the same thing loads of might spark tries gong various other garbage so I'm not really concerned about any of this stick stuff and yeah if we scroll down to the bottom it's all what was that I just saw something else oh there's a malware adware again it's Yong - that's just the Installer again it's not a virus though is just adware but again this is all just pups and stuff like that none of this isn't really a virus per se so I'm not worried about any of this is just junk so we're going to get rid of all of this I'll handset women council acts we've got some unchecked items and I'm just going to select all and quarantine all of that so we're not really concerned and now on computers that actually have viruses on them I've seen I've seen like 8,000 identified threats I seen a go over 10,000 a couple of times and at that point it's just gratuitous just all the tracking cookies ever kind of thing so yeah as I say it's not unusual to get results from this typically speaking although a lot of service jobs I do come up with an empty scan but to be honest I'm usually surprised and slightly suspicious when I find nothing on a computer so so yeah I'm not concerned about that at all so let's wait for it to grind through that now so see you after the next cup all right we're all done we need to reboot okay and with that I think we are a bit done so we've just rebooted we've got a little bit of disk activity that's bouncing up and down now and then but that's because we've just started the laptop up you know all computers are going to have heavy disk usage immediately after startup especially when they're still running mechanical hard drives but that's actually calmed down now anyway so we heard on over to performance whoops and there we go there's our disks usage collapsing there that's fine and now we've got a nice good idle speed so let's just see how fast stuff opens so let's start menu and settings not bad so yeah loading up settings and then opening this PC and stuff like that is my general benchmark yeah that's that's not bad that's acceptable now obviously if we had an SSD or something like that in there then all of these things would be instantaneous but we don't were on a mechanical so that's not bad going so let's review when we started working on this thing the principle issue was the AVG had died I was jamming the whole thing up however not once we removed that it was then sluggish where it just had a lot going on in the background then we fixed the idle end by reducing background applications and now we have fixed the overall performance by giving it a good defrag and housekeeping and so now we've got a laptop where the customer was assumed that the laptop was broken or was failing and was asking me to check the hard drive and stuff like that when in reality all it needed was a good service that's exactly what we've given it and this thing's ready to go out now so this one took quite a while because of those issues with AVG and so on on a typical laptop I would be able to do this job within the space of an hour or two depending on the speed of the laptop and so on whereas this one you know I actually spend a couple of days doing this one because we hit the weekend and some of those jobs took you know like the windows upgrades and things like that just took it a very long time to work through but as you can see we've got there me in so the last question that might be on your mind is why didn't I just reinstall windows well that's a fair point on this particular computer reinstalling Windows would have been a viable option I could have just backed up the customers data and reinstalled windows however by doing it this way I have not disturbed any other configurate the customers configuration because when you reinstall windows the customer will walk away and it'll be faster but they'll always be thinking oh this isn't quite the same as it was I haven't got those things that I previously had I don't know what I've lost so reinstalling Windows is always the last resort for me and on most normal systems as I say because you can do this service within an hour or so it is still quicker to service the laptop and while yeah I'm sure on a high performance custom-built computer you can install Windows in less than an hour but when you account the fact you've then also got to reinstall any applications the customers using you've got to do a backup and restore before and after that and then you've got to sort out anything else like for example if I have Microsoft Office on there you've got to look up that office license when you download office get that up today it's just not faster to reinstall windows whichever way you paint it so that is my standard service that's what I do on all the computers to come in here for attack now again the other thing that I do need to remind you is that this service does vary a lot there are other things that I do on certain other computers for example you know I mean if we go through the service and we find that the hard drive is full we've got to find a way of freeing up some hard drive space that might be because they've got too much junk on there it might be because there's a runaway log file or it might be that non 360 is up put is backing up the hard drive to itself which just immediately runs away and or another thing is a lot of laptops you could have a partition to see a partitioned hard drive so when you're say three hundred and twenty gig hard drive on an older laptop has been partitioned into two hundred 250 gig partitions and one of them is completely full while the other is completely empty I would then need to remove that partition so there are other small things that I do to also improve the computer but what I'm trying to show you in this video is just the mentality is to show you what we try to achieve and the kind of full process that we go through to achieve it is we look at the computer and we say what is making this not be as good as it could be what is making it slow what is making it run out of space what is making it not idle properly and then we go through and we do whatever we can do that will improve that and we we rinse and repeat until we feel that either a we've done everything we can to improve that or be we've got to the point where the laptop or the computer is running at what we believe should be its expected speed now this computer this is no rocket ship this laptop however it's also got an AMD e2 running at 1.7 gigahertz this my job will never be fast per se but it's actually the state where we can actually use it properly now so as you can see there's a little bit of delay when it's loading stuff up but overall is completely tolerable it's responsive it doesn't feel broken anymore is just having a couple of moments to load because it's a cheap laptop so past that I hope you found this informative as I say don't take this as a step-by-step guide on how to service a computer take this as a concept is an introduction to servicing and an introduction to tuning so finally there's one more thing that I wanted to mention as well is back in the good old days I used to be a number chaser and we actually go through and I mean if we open up task manager and you used to be able to go in to check the process count on a computer and grind that down as low as you could now I use the process camp as a rough guide for the health of a laptop however as windows get has got moved on as we go up higher in Windows the process count increases I mean a hundred processes used to be a total disaster as far as I'm concerned now I consider a complete to be completely normal when you're number chasing you can get I mean back in the good old days of XP when we had single core CPUs and I used to be able to I used to be driving that that process countdown to sub 30 and on my own computer I headed down to about 12 or 13 and that was giving me lightning fast but start up in response times however on the new age of multi-core processors and SSDs if there's just no benefit to doing that anymore we try we do what we can to cut down background applications but there's no more real tangible benefit to number chasing anymore and I have tried that recently as well I have I've got a really crap Toshiba down here with an IND C 50 CPU in it I actually got back down to 226 processors at idle on Windows 10 and there was no noticeable improvement in performance none whatsoever and it was getting to the point where for example to get below 30 I had to kill Cortana and that killed the Start menu completely so I was starting to do major really major and crippling changes to Windows in order to get that process countdown and there was no noticeable improvement in performance so past that thank you very much watching everyone I will see you all next time bye bye for now

Channel: Adamant IT

Views: 68,197

Rating: 4.9304504 out of 5

Keywords: adamant it, adamantit, computer, repair, shop, apple, mac, macintosh, acer, asus, dell, hp, lenovo, ibm, sony, toshiba, custom, gaming, rig, modding, gigabyte

Id: VTMnTiEoosQ

Length: 53min 39sec (3219 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 09 2017