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 โฆ 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.
- 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.
-
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.
