HDD is Hard Disk Drive...I think you mis-typed.

Anyway upgrading to a Solid State Drive, SSD, should realize a considerable boost to operational speed.

If you are connecting wireless to a router or access point, running a hardwire drop will also boost speed of tasks performed.

Your money is best spent on an SSD. Most of the wait time a user experiences is due to hard drive access and write times.

get rid of norton( if you can) . its ruined many a PC, i'll never use it again. if its norton( likely), hardware wont help

Vishera is the next generation after Zambezi. Both are AM3+ socket.

Wikipedia is your friend here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_FX_microprocessors

6200 and the ones you mentioned are all socket compatible. Actually, my feeling is that this is all marginal in an upgrade.

Just my opinion...

Yeah, definitely find another antivirus as a starter. There are several good free ones out there (avast, comodo, avira). This slowdown sounds software related, imo, so I strongly doubt upgrading the processor would help.

Also, consider what web-browser you're using. If you're using IE, try switching to Chrome or Firefox. If you've been using Chrome, make sure to remove any extensions that you don't need. Certain (or too many) Chrome extensions can really chew through ram faster than you'd think.

If you're just using your computer for web based applications, get a Chromebook. They're dirt cheap, don't need an antivirus (don't get a virus or malware), boot almost immediately, and software updates take all of 30 seconds.

Get a SSD and then scan for viruses and adware.

Yes, or as many people refer to it: Norton Crash Maker. I was given a copy that I installed on a HP laptop, and it made it unusable.

Norton is awful, ditch it forever.

Not an expert, but I run Avast on both my personal laptops and have good results.

Agreed with all of the above, dump Norton and never look back and put in a SSD for sure. In addition to kill a lot of bloat-ware and adware try running this free program and let it take out any spyware it finds.

Combofix

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/combofix/

They update the definitions daily but on the norm I run it once a week. For the first run it can take 10 -15 minutes on the scan, this is normal. Follow up scans are usually about 3-4 minutes. When it's finished it will create a log file (txt) and display what was found and removed.

get avast or avg they are both free anti virus and alot less memory hogs than Norton. As long as you are not an idiot behind the keyboard these services should do just fine.

AVG loves to take over: changing browser settings, installing browser add-ons, and other needless bloatware. It changes your search settings to "AVG Secure Search" so they can gather and manipulate your search traffic. Their browser toolbar is also malware, really sneaky.

If you don't mind spending a few bucks every year, I've found that Microsoft Security Essentials (decent and free) combined with MalwareBytes Anti-Malware Premium ($24.99/year for 3 PCs) is a good combination that's very light on resources.

If you're going to purchase SSD, I recommend either a Samsung 850 EVO or 850 Pro. If you're just doing everyday stuff, the 850 EVO is fine and will save you a few bucks. I've upgraded about 20 - 25 client computers and haven't had any issues with the Samsung drives. I won't use anything else.

Don't waste your money on a CPU upgrade. Unless you're a gamer, it isn't necessary. The HDD currently in your system is the biggest bottleneck.

Not to step on your toes or anything, but you have to be very, very careful running Combofix. It is a very powerful and extremely invasive program that can easily cause irreparable damage to a machine resulting in data loss and re-installation of the OS. I only use it in the most extreme circumstances when performing malware removal. I make client sign a data loss disclaimer prior to performing the scan.

If you're going to run this program, I would recommend a full backup first.

when you install, if you pay attention, you can uncheck a ton of these settings. I have personally had good luck with AVG. YMMV

Not toe stepping at all, I guess for some reason in my mind I assumed users always make a full backup first, then a restore point before attempting to run any configuration/registry editing software. With that said you're right it is very powerful and found it to be very effective against all these internet nuisances.

www.malwarebytes.org also is very good malware software.

Also, please be aware that SSD's are not without their faults. If you're running an SSD, please make sure to back up data to another device often! When an SSD fails, the data on it is essentially gone (same goes for hybrid disks since the SSD portion controls access to the spinning portion). When a spinning disk fails, chances are good you can just plug it in as a secondary drive long enough to recover some/most/all data from it.

fwiw, I'm an IT professional who has to deal, in part, with malware infections and failing hdd's to make a living.

Exactly why I switched to Avast. AVG was good for years, but then started trying to turn themselves into the free "Norton".

Some other free and helpful programs are:

CCleaner https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download (Run as needed)

Super Anti Spyware http://www.superantispyware.com/ (Runs in the background/manually)

and the above mentioned Malwarebytes. (Run manually as needed)

Add Avast AV and your PC should be clean of almost everything.

Eset's NOD32 is a great anti-virus program that doesn't consume your system resources like Norton, Kaspersky or many of the others.

Malwarebytes is a great choice as well for a anti-malware program and only costs like $10 for a lifetime license

I used to use CCleaner but haven't found the need to run it in over 5 years since I switched to using NOD32 and Malwarebytes

Agree 100%. Just bought one two months ago: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OBRE5UE/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s01

For fast reliable anti-virus I'd suggest Webroot. Check out the ratings and compares, its found things other like Norton or MacAfee have not. I back that up with Malwarebytes which you can try for free, it did a great job of removing some nasty stuff webroot could ID but not fully remove. Webroot is different because it relies on online scanning, however I have a VERY slow connection Less than 10MBS and it doesn't inter fear or slow down browsing any.

Stay away from AVG or anything free, your paying for it one way or another.

With both, I've avoided any infections for 5 plus years, but I'm also a fairly safe surfer, so when it does find something, its rare these days. I scan all downloads after and again after unpacking or installing

Honestly, myself and majority of the people I know in the computer industry don't use any antivirus solutions at all anymore. Just a firewall (which your computer has built in to the operating system) and an ad blocker on the web browser is all you need as long as your not downloading random pirated files or doing something else reckless.

I'm kind of surprised it's still running slow for you after upgrading to an SSD. I wonder if there is another issue at play here that's causing your computer to slow down. Some important things to check would be your CPU temperature (use program SpeedFan to find this), Event Viewer (type eventvwr into your start menu search box to find this) and see if there are any critical errors coming up in the "Windows Logs > System". Another good thing to do would be to check your processes (right click on your start bar and click "Task Manager", then switch to the tab called "Processes". If you click on where it says "CPU" it will sort the processes by ones that are using up the most resources, you might catch something that is causing the slowness.

Since you already have an SSD drive, processor is the next best upgrade unless you have open RAM slots. Don't sweat looking for a "Zambezi" FX-8350, that's just the internal code name that AMD uses to refer to the FX-8350. Make sure you are grounded and very careful when doing the swap, and make sure you get the retail version of the processor that will come with a new fan. If you want to reuse your old fan, you should reapply the thermal paste on it before putting it on the new processor.

Blocking ads & scripts by default prevents most infections. Browser extentions uBlock origin, AdBlock Plus, and NoScript are some I use (not all at the same time).

Combofix shouldn't be a once a week tool it should be a response to a problem. Weekly scans should be Malwarebytes, CCleaner, and/or your virus scanner of choice.

I've been using Avira for years and while it attempts to install a Chrome extension (which you can deny) and offers more additions (which you can also deny), it is very effective and does not change your browser settings or install additional crap behind your back. It only shows a small ad on startup in the lower right corner, and the base version is free. You can configure scheduled scans, exceptions, quarantine, and other stuff.

I am becoming familiar with Webroot. We use this at my workplace and it sends company-wide email alerts on a daily basis if threats are detected on any PC. You can manage it from a central console and deploy group policies for defining how the user interacts with the tray icon. Seems pretty good so far.

You have to remember, that most users are very quickly confused by ad blocking or no script software. I won't ever browse without it, but I was getting way to many calls from people when I was testing the response on some users. They were quickly discouraged and reverted back to IE within a day or so.

Also, ad block and a firewall isn't going to help you if you open an infected Word document you received via email containing the Cryptolocker or some other variant of ransomware. A firewall (unless hardware based) is just about worthless. Unless you have ports open that no normal person would open (23, 80, 3389, etc) you aren't a target. Your standard Windows firewall isn't going to protect you from any infection initiating an outgoing connection to a C&C server, only some script kiddy running a port scan on your IP.

For IT people, your suggestion is great, for end users, not so much.

You'll be surprised how much combofix finds that malwarebytes lets slip right through, which I have running on windows startup with the most up to date definitions (2016.7.13.13) . Granted maybe a more experience should run it but never the less it is very effective tool. IMHO it's better to catch it before becoming an issue, but to each is own.

The standard Windows Defender that comes with Windows 10 has been pretty good and relatively unobtrusive. Of course, one could make the argument that Windows 10 itself is malware, but I have my privacy settings locked down pretty much as hard as I can. I don't even use a Microsoft account to log in.

Then again, I only even really use my Windows partition for Overwatch these days, or web browsing in between matches. If I'm getting work done, I'll just switch over to Ubuntu.

I'm not surprised at all because Combofix deletes most temp files and clears most caches. It also makes registry and other changes that can brick your OS installation.

The risk of a Combofix glitch requiring an OS reinstall is greater than the benefit of running it weekly.

Maybe you will simply reimage from your weekly backup and be running again in fifteen minutes? If so it's a great solution.

Browsing habits can save a lot of trouble too, I browse with flash turned off, I have it pop up approval so I don't have to turn it on for those few sites I visit often that require it, but overall avoid content that requires it, and only approve on sites I can trust.

Webroot rates website search results, so you know the risk before you connect. Between the two I get avoid notices for anything marginal from Malwarebytes or Webroot and that keeps problems away. Both look for slightly different types of problems, so its been a good combo for me.

I'm not social, so staying away from facebook, etc makes a difference. Shared images, links, etc all increase risk. Free sites (games/ adult'ahem'entertainment etc, are all free for a reason, bait set and hook. Look to see what apps are running, free games and other 'free' entertainment are rarely really free, and about as free from infection as anyone in a fur and high heels standing in line at the free clinic.

If your running slow, I'd try free malware bytes and see what it find, if nothing it might start poking at hardware sources. in my experience hardware problems don't often cause things don't slow down they just stop. Loosing a dim of ram could 'slow' things down, as could nearly full hard drive, but in my experience, slow for most folks means infected with malware, adware that's consuming bandwidth to piggy back on your activity suing up resources and pipeline while send out details to people you don't want to have it.

Fragmented hard drive data can do the same, but unless your having to quit often to break out of a locked system, not as likely.

This isn't really an issue anymore. Starting with Windows 7, the OS manages it and defrags automatically.

I'm glad you brought that up actually. The OP installed a SSD, which should never, ever be defragmented. My understanding is that if you don't run the WEI following the installation, the OS won't enable TRIM and disable the automatic defrag task. But on the other hand, Windows 10 may do that during the SSD driver installation.

To the OP:

Open a command prompt. Right click the Windows Icon on the bottom left - Command Prompt (Admin). Type the following and hit Enter:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

If it returns 0, you're good, if you get a 1, then you'll want to run the WEI (Windows Experience Index) which will re-evaluate the hardware and enable the TRIM functionality.

None of this happens automatically and depends on what avg features you've installed. Anyone that goes for "express install" on anything is asking for problems.

I don't even run any virus stuff anymore. Windows defender on windows 10 seems to handle everything.

chromebook/chromebox is hands-down the best suggestion offered

I have a feeling that this thread has gone way beyond what the OP had anticipated but I will chime in again to point out a few of the good general suggestions:

Avast (free AV) (or NOD32 if you prefer a paid AV) - my favorite free AV changes from time to time, but Avast has always stayed in the top couple of options, imo. All of the suggestions here, including Windows Defender, are perfectly acceptable though.

MBAM (malware bytes) - Great program. Run it from time to time, particularly if you feel things are slowing down or you've been engaging in "risky behavior" online.

CCleaner - great for cleaning up "junk files." Just be careful if you are using some of its more in-depth features (like some of its registry cleanup options) unless you know what you're doing.

ublock Origin/AdBlock Plus/NoScript - depending on your preference and browser, its a good idea to run some sort of ad blocker. I personally like uBlock w/ Chrome, it has caused very little trouble with most pages.

Backup everything! Keep copies of important things on a drive other than your SSD, whether its another drive in your PC, an external drive, or even a cloud service.

Finally, make sure to defrag your SSD at least weekly!

I've hacked a Gibson if that's what you're looking for.

I used to love NOD, but their detection rate went to shi* a few years ago. Perhaps they are better now? Always had good luck with Symantec AV Corporate Edition.

Avast is hard to beat and has a really small footprint. The boot time scan is invaluable. Oh, and its free.

Norton is EVIL and should be considered a malware/virus as it takes over your system and slows it down.

SSD does not fragment so disable defrag and pre-fetch in settings. If there is a tool kit for your drive like intel or samsung has, get it and optimize the drive for windows.

Malwarebytes is pretty good. Definitely run it.

Ccleaner from piriform is really handy. The newer versions make it easy to edit your startups. It does a pretty good cleaning of registry bloat without killing windows.

Check your SSD capacity if its 75-80% full your drive will get slow, It has to do with the nature of the drive. You can only use 75% effectively before slow downs occur.

Start removing any nonsense or seldom used programs.

All of this will benefit any windows based computer without killing it.

MSG me if you have questions or problems

Avast is arguably the best "free" AV program out there with minimal nag screen intrusion (but not zero.) Norton is not only trash it's harmful. Get that crap away from any computer you care about.

NEVER, EVER use Combofix unless you (1) know what you're doing and (2) are desperate. It *can* fix some nasty problems but it can also trash your system's integrity and if it does the latter there's no coming back. It's a last-ditch attempt to save you from a reload. Malwarebytes is *much* safer.

Never, ever trust your data if it's only in one place. Devise, *test* (to make sure it works) and use a backup system of some sort. If you care about your information at all that system must include some sort of off-site storage on some sort of basis (e.g. rotating physical media, etc.) I've got data on my systems from the 1980s and I've yet to lose it despite having suffered multiple malfunctions over the years, and this is why. Either do this right or you *will* lose something you care about eventually.

An SSD is an excellent option and should be first on virtually anyone's list, but NEVER degrag them. They gain zero from doing it and it costs you material percentages of the drive's life. In addition TRIM has to be on, and it should be if you do the move to it properly (or a new install onto it.)

Be aware that "consumer" SSDs (that's most of them) are NOT power-protected. If you lose power unexpectedly, and that includes hitting the switch without shutting down first, they can be (read that as "usually will be") corrupted silently, *including* data that was not being written at the time. The reasons for this are a bit complex but have to do with the fact that to write a block that once held data you must read/erase/write, and the units in which this is done are MUCH bigger than what you usually want to write (typically 4MB or more.) This means that data that was not being written has to be read and then re-written, so "static, at-rest" data is ALWAYS at risk when a write is being done.

But.... the Intel 730 series SSDs, which are reasonably-priced, DO include power protection -- and I KNOW it works because I have software that can load-test it "in anger" and have verified that it in fact loses nothing on a cord-pull. IMHO they're worth the (small) extra scratch and the (small) loss in performance over the fastest SSDs for this reason. They are not only suitable for home purposes but also are suitable for light-duty applications in professional use (e.g. data centers and similar) for this reason -- and as such I won't buy anything lesser even for a personal, desktop machine. The 240Gb model is about $150 on Amazon, which is a very nice price for a fast and *safe* device. They also have a 480gb model for about $250.

@Tickerguy: the ssd data should only be at risk as the drive fills up. The os should use free sectors before doing a read-erase-write cycle. Since its so much faster to avoid the erase.

This is NOT true and assuming it is will leave you crying sooner rather than later.

First, the OS doesn't have any idea what the drive is doing behind its back. It used to be that a block #12345 was easily mapped by cylinder/head/sector to a given location on a disk. This stopped being necessarily true for spinning rust in some cases but it was never true for any solid-state device.

NAND flash has a certain number of erase/write cycles that it can take before it fails to be reliable. For this reason the drive "levels" writes; it intentionally will write to a different place each time you change a given individual block and then update its internal mapping tables. If you change data in units smaller than the drive's allocation size (which is MUCH larger than your filesystem allocation size) this forces what is called "write amplification"; that is, the impact on drive life of a 5-byte write is exactly the same as that of a 4MB write, since blocks can only be erased (and thus re-written) in 4MB chunks. The reason for this restriction is that NAND flash can only be written to "0"; you cannot write a "1". When you erase a block it is set to all "1"s and you physically write the "0"s.

That in turn means that the premise that you're "safe" until the drive gets close to being full is always flat-out false. In fact read/relocate/write cycles start happening when only a small percentage of the SSD has been allocated due to the above amplification issue and the fact that directory updates happen very frequently (access and modification times on files, for example) yet those writes are tiny in size.

For this reason *all* writes are dangerous on a SSD drive if the drive is not power-fail protected, and because the drive has no knowledge of filesystem organization it can make no attempt to aggregate or disaggregate different types of data (e.g. file data itself, file-level metadata such as directory entries and filesystem metadata such as superblocks, block free lists, etc.) The drive concerns itself with leveling the wear that its NAND takes, nothing more or less, since access to one block of NAND for read is just as fast as access to any other (there's no physical head to move or latency of rotation to wait for.) But since the drive had no idea what a given 512-byte write was (directory entry, filesystem metadata or file data itself) and the drive is concerned about wear leveling rather than having block X be physically next to block X +1 (or X -1) what else is on that same drive-level allocation block could literally be anything.

If power is lost when you are updating a block in a file and the drive is not power-fail protected this means that you may lose a material chunk of *unrelated* file data, an *unrelated* directory entry (!!) or even worse, *filesystem superblock data* rendering the entire filesystem unusable. The worst part of this is that the operating system has no idea it happened, and it will only be discovered later when you try to access that which is either corrupted or just flat-out gone.

That firms sell drives with this design "feature" is an outrage, but they do, and what's particularly dangerous about it is that simply holding the power button on a laptop or desktop machine that appears to have hung (forcing an ACPI shutdown) is enough to screw you without any way to know that it happened. Depending on exactly what sort of corruption occurs the consequences can be hidden for a very long time; for example, a block (or worse, LOTS of blocks, potentially millions of filesystem *blocks*, not bytes!) that are actually allocated from the OS perspective may not be marked as such in the filesystem's allocation tables on the disk. If that happens the system may blithely scribble all over existing file data as time goes on from that point forward and you are unlikely to discover the destruction of your stored information for weeks, months or even years.

Some SSDs advertise "partial" power-fail protection. Those devices hold enough stored energy to make sure their internal mapping tables can be written if the power goes off unexpectedly, but not enough to flush file data. Such drives are still unsafe; they protect against a catastrophic "lose everything on the drive" failure in the event of an unanticipated power loss but not against silent filesystem corruption.

Even block-level checksummed filesystems (e.g. ZFS on Unix machines) do not defend against this sort of problem; they are more-likely to detect it before other, non-block-level checksummed filesystems with reasonable proximity in time to the destruction itself but that doesn't help you if the data has been destroyed. A parity-style RAID arrangement with multiple physical volumes *might* save you in that its unlikely the same file or metadata blocks will be damaged on more than one physical device at the same time, but few people use that sort of arrangement on personal systems and relying on it to detect and rebuild from such a failure is foolish.

Buy SSDs that have full power-fail protection or make damn sure you have multi-level backups that you can restore from even if the destruction of your data is not detected for days, weeks or even months after it occurs -- and that you're willing to suffer the rollback to the previous stable state, which could be days, weeks or months in the past, if it happens.

So the drive has wear leveling. That should be handled by the drive firmware which should attempt to evenly write all the sectors before rewriting a used sector since flash write cycles are limited. So I would think the algorithm should be something like Write N bytes:
- read the old sector
- write the data updated to new unused sector
- mark new sector as the active sector for the logical address of the previous sector
- erase the previous sector.

If power is lost, the old sector is still intact as the section doesn't get erased until the new sector is written and marked active. This seems to be a wear leveling friendly algorith Id think. I guess it doesn't work this way as you are indicating.

Nope, because the drive cannot erase a single physical/logical sector. NAND is only erasable in (much) larger drive allocation blocks, typically 4MB in size (expect this to get much larger as capacities go up, by the way, because it is a function of how the die is constructed and as density goes up it becomes easier to make the erase block size larger too.)

This means that any time you write data in less than the drive's internal erase block size you are inherently reading and rewriting unrelated information that is not in the file you have open for writing. Said data is likely "at rest" and may have been at rest for a very long time. The drive has no way to know what it is; it might be directory information, a file's blocks, the filesystem free space bitmap or something else.

In addition the drive has a mapping table between physical (on-disk) allocation blocks and offsets and logical (as seen by the OS) sectors. That has to be updated too. If the power goes off with the mapping table and data on the drive being incongruent you're screwed. Remember that the *mapping table* is subject to the same problem; it too is on NAND flash and can only be rewritten in 4MB chunks! This set of interdependencies mean that it is entirely possible for the mapping table to be damaged during an update (e.g. the power goes off while it's being written!) resulting in the destruction of huge amounts of data -- quite possibly (and frequently) including everything on the device.

Finally, the drives lie. They tell the OS that an operation is complete when the data has been changed in on-drive RAM, *not* when it has been committed and all the metadata updates in the drive are complete. fsync() is supposed to not return until the drive has committed everything. Spinning rust drives sometimes honor this and sometimes don't; SSDs almost-universally do *not* flush all their buffer memory including their internal mapping table to a consistent state before returning "complete" under this circumstance.

There's a little program running around called "diskchecker.pl" (it's a perl script) that will test all this on a pair of machines. The writer process runs on a machine that you leave powered; the I/O process runs on the machine you cord-pull. You start both and then while the writer is writing you yank the power cord on the I/O machine, then reboot it and restart the program on that box.

When it comes back up the writer process gets the restart notification. It knows what the I/O machine *says* the drive had committed (because the I/O process had received a "complete" from the drive and passed it back to the writer) and therefore supposedly was complete; it then goes back, starting at the beginning of what it wrote, and verifies that every byte it wrote and got confirmation on is actually there.

Nearly *all* SSDs fail this test, and most fail it dramatically with data corruption *far* from where the I/O was when the cord was yanked. If you can run this thing a half-dozen times and see no corruption you're odds-on to be ok. If you can run it a hundred times you can be very confident. Most SSDs will fail on the very first attempt and a good part of the time they won't even come back up with a coherent filesystem on them after the cord is replugged.

The Intel 730s are pretty-much the only "consumer" drives that I've seen pass this test. Their S3500/3700 series pass as well, but those are a LOT more expensive and are marketed as data center devices.

If you use an SSD as an "operating system and program" device only, have no personal and irretrievable data on it (that is all on a server somewhere, etc) and thus don't care if it gets corrupted because you can simply reload it then consumer-style SSDs are fine. Most people, however, keep a LOT of personal and irreplaceable data on their system and do not segregate it off on either a robustly-backed up file server or have some other system devised to prevent them from being hosed by a corrupted boot volume. If you're one of those "most" then using "consumer" style SSDs is literally playing with a device that may self-destruct your data without warning.

BTW if you think the machine being on a UPS makes it "safe" you're wrong. This is what one of my production systems, which is on a UPS and has *never* taken an unclean power loss (the UPS notifies it when the battery gets low and it does a controlled shutdown in that instance) says when I ask the drive about its history when it comes to unsafe shutdowns:

Model Family: Intel 730 and DC S35x0/3610/3700 Series SSDs
.....
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAGS VALUE WORST THRESH FAIL RAW_VALUE

174 Unsafe_Shutdown_Count -O--CK 100 100 000 - 19

Now that doesn't mean that I would have gotten screwed 19 times had it not had power protection, but it does mean that I *might* have, and this is on a system *with* 100% UPS coverage that has never failed during the time that drive has been installed. However, it has been shut down for maintenance and such and during those shutdowns 19 times the drive had power removed from it before it had managed to commit everything to stable storage and verify that it was there. This is what the drive firmware itself tells me, not what the operating system believes.

This is why I buy SSDs with functional power protection and if a manufacturer claims their drives have it I *verify* that claim before I trust them.