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So I have an old HP Pavillion 15z laptop, that I used to get me through college. I ended up building a custom gaming desktop and haven't used the laptop in years.

I play DnD. I recently got picked to DM the next campaign, and want to put my new game table through its paces by projecting the maps onto the table through fantasy grounds. I pulled out my old laptop and suddenly it's running super slow. Almost unusable levels of slow. I ran a full factory reset on it, and so far it hasn't seemed to help. My friend and I ended up taking it apart to make sure that nothing got disconnected or damaged. Didn't see anything that would imply that. So now we are stumped on the issue. Best we can tell, its either a motherboard issue, a ram issue, or a hard drive issue.

I can buy a new HP Pavillion 15z laptop with all the same specs for about $300. The only difference is the RAM goes from DDR3L to DDR4, and from an AMD Quad-Core A8 to an AMD Dual Core A9. As near I can tell, basically every other spec is exactly the same.

So my fellow computer nerds on Dakka, what would you do? Try to fix the old one, not know if it will work but potentially saving a couple hundred dollars? or buy the new one?

Also let me reiterate. This laptop will only be getting used to run Fantasy grounds and some light mapmaking programs. It's my DnD computer, since my desktop is covering Gaming.

I think the main thing is if you can't work out where the error is the risk is that you'd end up near spending as much in spare-parts trying to replace them to fix the issue as you would on a complete new machine.

If its old and spent a lot of time not being used the internal battery in the motherboard might be worn so that would be a cheap thing to replace. Though that tends to be more with booting up and storing data between bootings rather than speed. IF a factory re-set hasn't resovled the issue then its likely closer to hardware related. That means unless you replace the affected hardware its likely a ticking time bomb before it dies.

I generally wouldn't expect RAM or motherboard problems to cause slow-down, you'd be more into the territory of Blue-screen-of-death errors or just not working.

Has it got a mechanical drive or a solid state drive? If the former then you might find that's got old and tired, but I'd expect if the drive was working hard you'd hear it chugging.

If you're up to it, you may find popping a solid state drive in it and rebuilding with a clean Windows installation sorts the performance; but if it doesn't you'll have spent $80 or so on not fixing it. It won't take many attempts like that (or any paid tech support) to make it a better deal just to buy a new laptop.


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Do you see anything dubious running in task manager? Does it run any better if you start it up in safe mode? Do you get any errors showing in your system event log?

It's a mechanical drive, one of the weirdest things, is that the entire computer runs near silent. It's the big reason we thought that maybe something had come unplugged. The slowdown is mostly on startup both of the computer, and just opening programs in general. However, I haven't mess around with it enough since the reset to get a good gauge on how much the slowdown is hitting.

I'll play around some more when I get off work and report back later. Thanks for the replies. they are helping me form a plan of action on how to isolate the issue.

You could try installing something like HDTune to benchmark the drive, and see if it's running as expected.

Running slow on startup, and when launching programs, would suggest to me there's something running in the background that's hogging the system resources.

Have a look at what's running on startup:
https://www.howtogeek.com/74523/how-to-disable-startup-programs-in-windows/

Be careful what you disable there though.

So I went through everything piece by piece yesterday after I got off work. It seems to be that the computer isn't properly assigning tasks between the CPU and the Disk. Task Manager was showing 100% disk usage, but only about 20% CPU load.

That 100% disk usage thing is the same issue I was having before I did the factory reset. I figured the 4 years of bloat from updates and programs and documents just wore on it. which is why when the problem persisted after a factory reset I immediately jumped to assuming hardware issues.

Then I noticed that it was the windows updater that seemed to be pulling all the resources. So for now, I'm just letting the computer update everything. Once that's done if the problem persists there are some other weird windows 10 laptop errors that could be causing the problem, but based on what I'm seeing online, it's fixable.

Thanks for the help guys. I think you saved me a fair amount of money

Good luck. Fingers crossed it's behaving OK once it's finished its updates.

Fix the old unless this option turns out to be more expensive than to buy a new one.

So the laptop is going to be put through its paces this week for the first DnD game. However, it seems to be working again. so looks like the fix was successful.

Glad to hear it sorted itself out