martincymru wrote:Dear Strong Eagle:
I have Windows 7, use Microsoft Office 2007 suite and ACROBAT. McAfee paid for anti virus.
Not sure this impacts your advice at all.
You won't be able to update Win 7 in place without source install disks and specialized knowledge. You could probably still upgrade to Win 10 without cost... it doesn't hurt anything to try, and I would recommend it.
MS Office 2007 is no longer a support product for upgrades,enhancements or bug fixes. There are known incompatibilities between 2007 and later versions, a few of which were fixed with SP3 but a few more were discovered post SP3. The biggest pain in the arse? Loading a Word doc produced in 2013 or later and watching 50 percent of the spaces between words disappear. There should not be incompatibilities between Win 7 and Office 2007 but if there were any caused by Win 7 updates, they would not be fixed in 2007... so if it's your office products that are running slow, you may wish to consider upgrading.
I'm still running Acrobat 2008 myself. There are no updates for it anymore but I bet you'll find an update service running... same for Adobe Reader, Bonjour, and a host of other installed apps. You can certainly kill these update services... they don't use a lot of resources but they do wake up to see if there are any updates.
I am not a fan of McAfee... it uses a lot of system resources while scanning, and this could be your cause of slowdown. You can find out by temporarily disabling McAfee and see how your computer responds. You need something with Win 7 (Win 10 Defender is more than sufficient if running Win 10) and I'd recommend Webroot... small footprint and as good a job as any product out there for catching crap... not that any of them are that good at zero day stuff.
Two other things are worth mentioning. In the past one would typically set memory size and CPU power on the basis of the kinds of apps you would be running... Word doesn't need much, Excel a little bit more, AutoCad a whole bunch. But, in this day and age, there are literally hundreds of services running in the background to give you the experience that you get, and all those services consume resources. In order to future proof, I wouldn't buy any PC these days that wasn't an i7 processor.
Two of the best things you can do to improve the speed of an older PC is to add memory and switch to a solid state drive. This is particularly true if you have only 4 GB or so of memory or work with very large files. A solid state drive can respond to requests at least ten times as fast as a hard drive, and with dropping costs are a great way to extend PC life... I just go through updating 40 Dell desktops with SSD's... it makes a real difference.
But again, running Malwarebytes and searching for crapware installed on your computer are still recommended actions as a starting point. So is doing a running services review, although this is a more complex undertaking.
FWIW: I support 50 Win 10 PC's, most with i5 processors, some with i7, with at least 8 gig of memory, and most with 16, and all with SSD's. I use Windows Defender and Firewall on local PC's. These work well with all but the largest of files (and I'm talking Excel files with 700,000 rows as a large file). We subscribe to Office 365 for office software.