Windows 10: Acer Laptop/Fresh install mysteriously slow. a few questions too

Hi everyone.
I am not making a lot of progress with this laptop and need help.
I have a 5-6 year old lower-end Acer with original installation with an i5 2.x GHz with 3.0GHz turbo and two sticks of 4 GB Ram. It started running slower and slower despite removing a lot of old programs so I decided to troubleshoot. A system restore came up with an error on all previous restore points. I then did an SFC scan and also got errors thate windows could not fix. I then proceeded with a Win 10 "Repair" in which I kept my files. It took overnight to do the repair and even after losing all the apps, it was slow. To put that into perspective, a reboot would take upwards 15 minutes. Opening a browser at least 2 minutes or more. Even typing had lag until the text appeared on the screen.
I then did a Reset. This took over 24 hours but was successful; no difference. Someone suggested my HDD was about to die but I didn't notice symptoms of a dying hard drive. Nevertheless, I performed a test while running with no errors and then removed the hard drive, hooked it up to another laptop to transfer my files and had no issues.
After the reset, I did a RAM test - no errors. Interestingly though, I did remove the ram chips and inspect and replace but I put them in different slots and the screen would not display thereafter. After returning them to original slots, it worked again. The Ram chips are labeled 1of2 and 2of2 but didn't think it would matter which slots they were in. Perhaps I didn't install securely when I switched them.
Anyway, did another SFC scan and got a a near 4 MB CBS log file and again messages that windows found errors that it could not repair. So that's where I am now. A few other details, last I checked, my Windows build was the older one (1809?). I can also recall in the course of my troubleshooting that somewhere it said I couldn't use a certain kind of repair tool on this laptop or that I couldn't upgrade to 1909. It's a vague memory but might make sense to you.
I also read on this forum someone with a very similar problem noticed that his CPU speed wasn't going higher than like .480 GHz so he pulled the battery and problem solved. I monitored CPU performance a little and saw my CPU was going right up to 2.x GHz but would often fall to very low speeds of less than 1 GHz. Is this normal?

Here are my questions:

1. When you use windows repair or reset utility and a clean version of windows is installed, where does it get these 'clean' OS files?
2. How is a repair or reset different than using a USB recovery thumb drive that you create when you unbox the laptop?
3. How do I actually wipe the HDD clean and reinstall windows (and where does windows come from)?
4. Could a virus or hard drive glitch lead to corruption of the files Windows uses to restore or repair?
5. The back of my laptop doesn't have a Windows serial# on it. Is the number I retrieve from system properties the licence number (I am concerned if I do a hard drive wipe and install windows from external source that it will ask me for my licence number and I don't have the correct one. I did but this laptop new form Staples).
6. When I had my hard drive hooked up external to another laptop to transfer files, I was surprised to see that windows would not allow me to access several Windows protected folders (like Users folder) so I wasn't able to transfer the contents of My Documents or saved Windows Live Mail folder. This surprised me. How are those folders protected when they are not in their parent computer?
7. What suggestions do you have as a next step?

Thanks for wading through all this!

:)

 

Fresh installation, Edge is slow, outlook is slow, laptop won't log into router

Hi Acelyn,

As mysteriously as the problem arose, it has gone again.

I didn't do anything and can think of no logical rational explanation except Windows was doing something which was choking my bandwidth.

To answer your third question, by the way, is irrelevant, because as I mentioned I have two machines on same connection and only the laptop was reporting the slow speeds. Unless of course the other machine was hogging all the bandwidth. I hadn't thought
of that. But unlikely because it was dormant.





So the issue is fixed. But I have no idea what first caused it or why. A fresh installation of windows didn't fix it. It mysteriously fixed itself!

 

Acer Laptops :are they crap ?

Acer makes a cheap prodcut period. They user lower end plastics, as well as assembly. (I hate working on Acer laptops)

If budget is an issue then get an acer... though for $50 more you could get a gateway that will smoke the acer in terms of quality.

For a laptop though i would suggest one of the DV7T's from HP or a Business class Toshiba/HP/IBM (not the lenovo branded, the Thinkpads)

 

Laptop running extremely slow after fresh install of windows 10?

Hi,

Since you have just recently performed a fresh install of your Windows 10, it's hard for us to pinpoint as to what's causing your computer to run slow. To help us improve your computer's performance, please check out the suggested troubleshooting steps and
Tips to improve PC performance in Windows 10.

Feel free to let us know the result so we can further assist you.

Regards.