u/NSpendelowTelegraph

Hope these steps help before consigning your old machine to the cupboard or spending thousands on a new model

1. Use your laptop plugged in (and turn it off and on again)
2. Switch off battery-boosting settings - Energy Saver mode uses multiple tactics to reduce battery consumption, including lowering maximum power
3. Stop applications from opening on start-up - If your laptop is slow when it first starts up, it may be because a whole bunch of apps have been given the green light to wake up with it.
4. Free up storage space - Generally, once you hit around 15 to 20 per cent of remaining storage space, you can expect to see performance slow
5. Reset/clean wipe your laptop - Make sure you’ve backed up any data you want to keep
6. Check for and remove excessive dust build-up - Any laptop that uses fans (which is most of them) will have its cooling performance limited by dust build-up
7. Upgrade your memory - Upgrading your laptop’s RAM can have a major impact on performance, particularly if your system has 8GB or, much worse, just 4GB
8. Switch to SSD storage - The biggest laptop upgrade I’ve made is moving from a storage hard drive to something called a solid-state drive (SSD)