Sluggish laptop

[#1]

I need some advice. I have a 2 yr old HP Pavillion Laptop, 4 Gb, AMD A8 processor (if memory serves me correct), running Win 10. After powering up there is almost continuing disk activity (disk light is solid) for several minutes, which seems to make the laptop response, internet browsing, email downloads, opening apps, etc. very sluggish. There is also apparently a lot of upload/download activity even when not actively using the laptop, which is ethernet cable connected to router (TG582n on fibre connection).

I would like to find out if the issue is related to the line speed or any background processes running, or if the processor is simply not up to running Win 10 (laptop originally bought with Win 8 ). Connection speed is typically 50/15 down/up on fibre, so shouldn't be an issue. As there appears to be internet traffic I'm wary of turning off antivirus to check if that is causing the issue, and ideally would like to know how to go about checking what else may be happening, but haven't much of a clue where to start or what to look out for. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[#2]

how full is the hard drive

I have an i3 CPU which is only a bit better and it runs W10 with no problems

[#3]

Sounds to me like the disk could do with defragmenting and optimising.

[#4]

There is a 1TB disk, which is approximately 12% full. Defragmentation I can do, what is optimising?

[#5]

First thing I would do is start Task Manager and see what is doing it

[#6]

i always say you cant go wrong by using these handy programs from MS

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processexplorer

[#7]

@maranello - It is where software puts large file together so as to keep them contiguous on disk so when they are read the heads don't need to be moved to another part of the disk and the read operations are faster. But with 12% usage I doubt it's an issue, but worth a look all the same.

[#8]

It can be quite difficult to figure out what is making a computer sluggish.  If you hold down the Control (Ctrl) Shift and Escape (Esc) keys you will launch Task Manager.  Click the details option and you will see the CPU, Memory and Hard Disk usage.  If any one of these is at or near 100% for any length of time then the computer performance can feel sluggish.  Perhaps the hard disk is under more demand than it can cope with and you will see that is at 100%?  Let us know.  

[#9]

Thanks to all who have responded thus far. Based on the advice given my plan is as follows.

1. Disable internet, see if it makes any difference. If not, Task Manager should tell me if for example AVG is a culprit - could then confirm by disabling AVG.

2. Restart laptop with internet enabled. Check task manager for processes with high CPU, memory and/or hard disk activity. If I don't know what these processes do I can either google them or if I don't understand what I'm reading report back here.

3. Report the outcome on here and thank everyone, obviously  

[#10]

Not having had much time yesterday evening to investigate, but a quick view of Task Manager soon after signing in suggested that AVG processes were consistently near the top of the list for disk activity. 

Coincidentally, AVG popups for PC tune up are telling me that there are over a hundred processes that are affecting performance, but I need to pay to find out which they are. What's the chance that AVG appears on that list, I wonder!

[#11]

You are running lots of W10 spyware + lots of monitoring software (AVG).

No wonder it's slow.

Your best tune-up would be to delete AVG.

[#12]

Why not try uninstalling AVG and let the Windows 10 built-in security software ("Defender") do the job?  At the very least you'll be free from those annoying AVG sales pitches.

[#13]

Uninstalled AVG and activated Defender. Now much improved, although cannot tell if the improvement is due to AVG removal or Windows update.

[#14]

1. Are you using a micrrosoft account and copying everything up to onedrive? If so set up a local account, disable onedrive and see if that improves things.

2. Download Malwarebytes free. This will scan your computer and identifiy PUPs (potentially unwanted programmes). You can disable these from Malwarebytes free.

3. Make sure that the Windows continuous de-fragging service is not running. It is this last one that was causing my laptop hard disk to be continuously flogging itself to death.

[#15]

AVG sometimes malfunctions in a manner that can cause the computer to run very slowly.  So it might be possible to re-install AVG, although I would not recommend it.

I have observed that Windows Update will sometimes hog a lot of bandwidth when downloading an update file.  So this makes other internet applications run very sluggishly, but not the computer per se.