Chosen Solution
Hi @crogamer_1 , When did you upgrade from Win 8.1 and did you update the Express cache driver as directed to by Asus on their support page? This is shown on the Asus driver page for your laptop. Select Win 10 as the OS and look under the Utilities > Show All. Don’t know if it is still relevant after 2015 though as Win 10 may have catered for it after that date. You said that you updated all the drivers. Where did you get them from as the Asus page for your model has so few? Here’s a link to the latest Asus drivers for laptops. In the “other drivers’ section it has the latest Express cache drivers. I suggest if nothing else carefully update all the drivers “relevant” to your laptop (check in Device manager and programs and features) and see what happens. Do it one at a time and wait to see if any other problems occur or if it fixes your problem before installing another one. If problems occur you can always roll back the driver. Create a system restore point before you start that way you can always go back to what you had before you started. If you go to update the ATK package and the Smart Gesture drivers, ensure that you install the ATK package FIRST before the Smart gesture otherwise you’ll have touchpad and touchscreen (if you have this) problems
It sounds like the performance issues show up the most when there are disk operations involved in loading the programs. I would suspect that the hard drive is beginning to fail. What you are likely seeing is repeated read attempts to get data from the drive (also called retrys). I would either replace the drive with another of the same type or upgrade to an SSD drive. Replacing the drive with another similar drive should return the performance to the original purchase levels. Changing to an SSD may provide even better performance.
You’re right on the money! That old and dated Hard Drive is what is slowing you down! Upgrading to a SSD should boost your speeds. I suggest getting a minimum of a 1 TB SSD just in case you start running out of space again (that will slow your computer down again) Guide on changing the HDD to a SSD
