Any ideas on what I should do?

[britechguy]

But, gentlemen, again, the things you're saying about web browsing support my position to some extent.

Under "typical conditions of use" for a very great many the drive is not the constraining factor when it comes to web browsing. Far more often it's the internet connection speed, available RAM, or a combination of the two.

One of the things I am trying to say, directly, is that we need to look at "typical conditions of use" as a whole ball of wax for any given individual user or location where multiple users have very similar configurations. It's all a balancing act, and maximum speed for "given activity X" is directly constrained by whatever the narrowest opening in its "processing pipeline" happens to be.

There's also the fact that speed is very much a function of perception. When people get "new and improved" with sudden changes it's often treated like a miracle at the point of change. But given a few months, suddenly the performance that was "a miracle" is now anything from just the everyday expectation to "too slow."

My personal predilection is to try to train people away from conditioning themselves to believe that everything should constantly keep getting "more and more instantaneous." Most of what we humans are doing in this day and age is already far, far faster than evolution ever built us, cognitively or physically, to process at the already available speeds. Feeding the beast of needing constant increases in that speed is counterproductive on a number of levels.

 

[britechguy]

For what reason then if the performance increase is only negligible?

I never, ever, said or implied what the word "negligible" means. This is the perfect example of my own statements being completely misinterpreted.

I never said "negligible," or "marginal," or anything like that. There are improvements, and significant ones at particular times, particularly boot time, but lesser ones during daily use time.

It is up to each individual to decide what value they put on those improvements. But none of them, in my opinion, is "silver bullet miracle" in overall extent when a well-tended machine with a good HDD is in use compared to the same hardware but using an SSD instead.

And if you're someone like me, who keeps my machine on 24/7 except for the occasional reboot, boot time is the very least of my worries if said boot time is within normal limits for either a fully-functioning HDD on a well-tended platform or an SSD. My biggest concern is how does the computer "feel to me, speed wise" when I'm sitting in front of it and working. With a few exceptions the "feel" is not that much different for me when using a machine with an HDD versus SSD. And I keep multiple web browsers with a minimum of tens of tabs open in each, a word processor, often a text editor, and File Explorer instances open at all times as well as having things like the Everything Search indexing service, Google Drive for Windows, and several other processes running in the background.

So I guess you could say that I am saying "almost negligible once the machine is up and running and I'm in front of it." But backups from an SSD to an external HDD are another area where there is a distinct increase in speed, which some really want, and if they are someone who uses an external SSD for backup, then that speed does increase radically. For me, that's not important because backups are kicked off before I retire for the night, but for others that's not the case.

We're right back to my oft-repeated truism, "Tool to task." But being able to determine the right tool(s) means careful analysis of wants and needs in context.

 

[16bwhitt]

The hard drive is for sure on its way out, hard drive health has declined again. Especially after the comments of Luke, it is time to replace the drive or get a new machine. I've convinced the client to get a new machine, one with an SSD once my on-site guy is doing better.

I do agree no machine moving forward should have a regular HDD, but Win 10 runs just fine on a healthy HDD drive. The boot times may be a little slow, but daily use as @britechguy said, is fine.

Thanks all for the help!

 

[Markverhyden]

No SSD, regular spinning disk. AV software is Malwarebytes and MS Defender.

And I'd bet it's a 5400 rpm

 

[16bwhitt]

And I'd bet it's a 5400 rpm

It was actually 7200rpm

 

[alexsmith2709]

The "night and day" argument when dealing with a "normally stessed" machine and a good SSD versus HDD does not hold water. And I have plenty enough hands-on experience to state that without the slightest equivocation.

It does hold water. Most of my home user clients use their laptop for emails and social media. Maybe the odd bit of word processing. I would call this "normally stressed", but others could even argue this doesnt even come close to being stressed.
When a consumer grade laptop with 8GB RAM and a spinner is running slow for these sorts of usage, 99% of the time swapping out the drive for an SSD will solve the problem. Even using Chrome with 8GB RAM is fine for the most part.
Before Windows 10, i was of the opinion that i would spend time trying to find the root cause and make 100% sure it was the hard drive was the cuase of the slow down, i would remove temp files, defrag etc. I hated other local shops that would replace the hard drive (and so did my customers as many wouldnt even offer to backup/restore) no matter what the problem was, but with windows 10 the HDD is the first thing to consider.

 

[NJW]

The "night and day" argument when dealing with a "normally stessed" machine and a good SSD versus HDD does not hold water. And I have plenty enough hands-on experience to state that without the slightest equivocation.

I think we just need to agree that you and the rest of us inhabit different but parallel universes, where yours also requires many more words.

 

[Joep]

Hard Disk Sentinel shows the drive health as 35%. I repaired some bad sectors.

There's no such thing. Either sector was not bad (or soft error or whatever you want to call it) or it has simply hidden the sector (reallocated).

 

[lcoughey]

There's no such thing. Either sector was not bad (or soft error or whatever you want to call it) or it has simply hidden the sector (reallocated).

And the contents of those sectors was probably lost.

 

[fincoder]

Different bottleneck there. Your browser can only retrieve as fast as your internet can feed to it.

The rendering of the page is slightly snappier because it's loading the cached content from an SSD. Granted it's most noticeable with decent internet speeds, but plenty of ordinary users have good internet speeds.