On 02 Mar 17  18:46:00, Mike Powell said the following to All:

MP> Good evening,
MP> Are there any tips or tricks one would suggest when looking over a Windows
MP> machine when the owner (not you) thinks it is "running slow"?

Hands down - Run Task manager and check CPU usage, sorting highest to lowest.

Open "Performance" and run Resource Monitor. This will break down in detail
what processes are using what.*Upon getting a clearer picture of what exactly 
is running on the machine at a given time, run HijackThis 1.99 as 
Administrator to more accurately contro what is loaded on system startup.

Non important items such as Adobe Acrobat updater, Google Chrome pre-fetch 
service, etc, all that crap can be deleted from startup.

I guarantee you as someone troubleshooting Windows computers for 18+ years my
two suggestions will give you an idea of whats going on. I strongly advise
against running CCleaner or other utilities until it can be determined
exactly what is causing the "slowdown".

DO NOT, under ANY circumstances, run "snake oil" programs like registry 
defragmenters, registry cleaners, etc.

Another suggestion.. DO NOT defragment the hard drive of ANY customer's 
computer that "runs slow". Run a drive S.M.A.R.T. status utility BEFORE any 
kind of disk-intensive operation such as a defrag. In most cases, customer 
computers "running slow" have been running that way for awhile, have other 
causes as pointed out, and are in such bad condition (relatively speaking) 
that no defragmenting will cure the root cause, notwithstanding the unknown 
condition of the hard drive itself.

Nick

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
 * Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (618:500/24)