A slow laptop is rarely a dead laptop. Before you budget for a replacement, work through these fixes — in our experience, the first three alone resolve the majority of everyday slowdowns.

Start with the quick wins

Restart properly instead of sleeping for weeks, trim startup programs, and check for runaway background processes in your task manager. Free up disk space if your drive is over 90% full — SSDs slow down dramatically when nearly full.

The upgrades worth paying for

If your laptop still uses a spinning hard drive, an SSD swap is the single most transformative upgrade in computing. More RAM helps heavy multitaskers, and a fresh OS install clears years of accumulated cruft.

When none of that helps, look at thermals: dust-clogged fans force chips to throttle. A careful cleaning or repaste can restore performance a laptop had on day one.