My sister has a 3 year old Dell laptop running Windows 7 64 bit. She said t’s been running extremely slowly for a while so I went over to check it out. It boots up quickly, but when I click on a program to open it nothing happens for a long time, then eventually it will open but crash. The start menu crashes continuously. I ran a Norton scan and nothing was found. I then ran a Malwarebyte’s scan and it found just one issue but it was a rogue which I removed. I then rebooted and went into the startup folder and disabled anything unnecessary, there wasn't too much to disable.Then I attempted to go into Add/Remove Programs to delete any unnecessary programs but there it was going extremely slowly. It would take a good 15 to 20 minutes or so to remove just one program.
My question is, does this sound like a hard drive issue or a virus? She can do a reformat to see if that helps, but it seems to me with what I was experiencing it might be a hard drive issue, even though there was no message to that effect. Considering it was pretty clean and there was little to disable in the startup folder it just seems strange to be running so slowly due to a software issue. Also I ran it in safe mode and it was much better, and I once had a PC that had a dying HD and it ran better in safe mode than in normal Windows
