Very, very slow loading

All of a sudden my Dell Inspiron 5 laptop has slowed down to barely a crawl. I've searched online but I'm old and all is pretty much Greek to me. The machine is pretty plain except that I added a VPN a while ago but I'm not logged into it now.
Any help will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Barry

Slow can mean multiple things. Please clarify. Are you saying your internet browsing has slow loading pages or are you saying your computer itself is slow. (ie slow to boot up, applications/files not loading fast, etc. In other words is it internet related or OS related?)

Open: Terminal (Admin) and run this command...

sfc /scannow

Go to Task Manager>Startup Apps and disable all third party apps from Auto starting.Just have Win 11 operating.
Shutdown then restart and is there any improvement in performance?
If so,then enable the third party apps,one at a time,to auto start and see which one causes the slowdown,or if it is an accumulation causing the problem.
Try to keep auto starting to a minimum because it can be resource intensive.

Still say suggestions are very pre-mature until the poster tells us more about exactly what is slow.

glasskuter said:

Still say suggestions are very pre-mature until the poster tells us more about exactly what is slow.

Click to expand...

The websites are very slow to load but aren't as slow to move around in. I called my ISP and they ran speed tests and confirmed that they were much lower than they should have been. I pay for 1G download speed but the tests were in the upper 300s. I ran a test and the latency was 11ms which seems to be too high. The ISP tech will be here tomorrow afternoon and, hopefully, can fix the problem. At least I'll have a better idea of what's wrong.

Thanks to all for your suggestions!

barrynfla said:

The websites are very slow to load but aren't as slow to move around in. I called my ISP and they ran speed tests and confirmed that they were much lower than they should have been. I pay for 1G download speed but the tests were in the upper 300s. I ran a test and the latency was 11ms which seems to be too high. The ISP tech will be here tomorrow afternoon and, hopefully, can fix the problem. At least I'll have a better idea of what's wrong.

Thanks to all for your suggestions!

Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure that neither the data rate nor the latency is causing your problem.

barrynfla said:

All of a sudden my Dell Inspiron 5 laptop has slowed down to barely a crawl. I've searched online but I'm old and all is pretty much Greek to me. The machine is pretty plain except that I added a VPN a while ago but I'm not logged into it now.
Any help will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Barry

Click to expand...

Good thing I am Greek and can help you then

For a slow computer first suspect is a failing hard disk. Use a utility such as Crystal Disk Info or Hard Disk Sentinel to see the disk health. If it is less than 95%, you should backup your data and replace it. Even if it seems healthy (100% health), I would run at least the short test. After passing that I would run the long test to find and mark bad sectors.

Assuming your disk is OK the next suspect is RAM. You can check it with a utility called MemTest. Better to download the ISO and create a bootable USB flash drive to boot from it and check the RAM.

Then I would do a full system scan with Superantispyware or Malwarebytes Antimalware. Remove all results. If it finds more than 400, I would do a second full system check with a different spyware detection utility to remove anything that might have not been detected by the first.

Do these, posts results and we will help you more.

PS: Needless to say you should disable all useless startup applications, such as updaters, notifiers and browsers. You can manually load them any time, why waste resources?

Update: The ISP tech was here and replaced the outside FIOS unit. He said there was an issue with it. Right now I have internet access so I'm just going to leave well enough and not worry about it any more.

Edit: I updated download speed to 2Gig and all seems faster now.

@barrynfla You still might want to consider running free Malwarebytes, also the SFC /Scannow will fix any errors.

Free Antivirus 2026 | Download Free Antivirus & Virus Scan | 100% Free & Easy Install cheers.

remover said:

@barrynfla You still might want to consider running free Malwarebytes, also the SFC /Scannow will fix any errors.

Free Antivirus 2026 | Download Free Antivirus & Virus Scan | 100% Free & Easy Install cheers.

Click to expand...

Good advice! I have Malwarebytes on my computer and I did run the SFC/Scannow. Malwarebytes performs a full scan ever day at 2 AM.