became so laggy and supper slow even when opening task manager yesterday (05/21/26)
so yesterday, i was just doing my daily stuff watching youtube and on another tab is manga/manhua site. nothing crazy just the basic since my device is a budget-budget. crazy for 4gb in 2026 right? but still works. so i decided to restart my laptop after i finished a sidemen video. it restarted, i open brave to watch again but its moving slow. like lagging. at first i thought maybe things are just loading up since i just restarted the device. but no, its really slow. tried restarting it a couple times after that and not touching it for an hour. still lagging.
today, tried it again. brave browser doesn’t even open anymore. chrome does tho. even task manager open slowly. like 5-8secs to open and 2-3 seconds for it to load the logos. i mean for 4gb ram its always at 70% or 80% ram load. just trying to see if theres that mining virus stuff. i also tried system restore which was the day before 05/20/26, and still the same, just giving me new update (no driver update, the new security update is not showing again so idk the name)
tried installing coretemp too to see if maybe its just running hotter, that wont open too. so i just cleaned the vents which barely have any dust.
Unit is Acer Aspire A514-54G
system on 256 SSD and have 1tb hdd
1 ram slot available. could get it to max 12Gb. its not just my priority rn. 8gb is like $50. outside US, $50 could be atleast 3 weeks of my gas (work/home).
also battery is dead. its been dead for a year now. still running just on grid.
basically everything was fine until i restarted my unit yesterday. i didnt change anything before restarting.
what can i do to fix this?
PS : im not super techy. just know a little. also i cant reset and do a clean install on my unit coz of a gov program i use. having it installed again is a hassle because the guy who install it is not always available. its not a heavy program. just encoding record stuff like birth/death/marriage. yk, birth certificate stuff.
edit : i also did a scan earlier this month from those 1 time no install virus scan like eset, kaspersky and other 1 i forgot the name. did full scan and offline scan of windef. only kaspersky detected 1. nothing happened really, same like always.