Passing along an "appropriate affections" message to all of Don's forum friends here! I know I've missed seeing him on here - as I'm sure you have!

He'll be back, of course - but if you feel like saying hello to him in the meantime - he is using Facebook Messenger, and I know he appreciated our conversation (as did I)... so feel free to send him a message!

-Callie

Thanks Callie

Maybe I missed it but is Don temporarily unable to post?

Thanks, Callie, Josie, Matt. You've lifted my spirits amid a terrible computer problem that has/is crippling my system.

Namely, a tortuously slow boot (9+ minutes) and I lack the dexterity to start afresh with Windows 10 Home Edition. I've run most free fixes with zero joy.

Color or colour (Canuck-speak) me totally depressed and frustrated.

Used to have that problem until I swapped to an SSD, makes a lot of difference.

If you get CCleaner go into tools and startup and disable most stuff in there.

Musiclover,

I've run CCleaner several times with no change. I'll run it again now and see.

Thanks for tossing out a lifeline.

BTW, my C: drive is a 1TB SSD with about 500 MB free.

Don, have your tried the following:
1-rkill https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/rkill/

2-adwcleaner https://www.malwarebytes.com/adwcleaner/

3-antimalwarebytes https://www.malwarebytes.com/mwb-download/

If not run them in the above order.

If that doesn't help then run the Security Tango

https://securitytango.com/windows.php

This was put together by a computer expert around here. He was the IT guy at a tech college, has a radio show each week as well as a newspaper article each week here in Rochester, NY. Note that everything used here is free.

Good luck good buddy.

{edit} an after thought - you didn't defrag that SSD did you?

Good info from Mario.

As regards CCleaner Don, other than running it, I was thinking about going into Tools on the GUI selecting startup and disabling most stuff there, including your antivirus and other malware killers.

Do the roboot and see if that helps. Antivirus can go rougue sometimes especially things like Comodo firewall I have found.

Dear friend, Mario,

No, I haven't defragmented my SSD. Should I?

I did, however, install and run the apps you linked. It might be wishful thinking but it seems to boot a little faster now.

I'll to do the Tango routine tomorrow, I need to do some household biz first.

Thank you my friend.

Do NOT defrag an SSD.

It shortens the life of the drive.

Defragging has to do with placement of magnetic data where the rotating disk and drive head of a conventional hard drive will read it most efficiently. This has no value on an SSD and uses up the drive unnecessarily.

However, Windows and solid state drive manufacturer programs have a feature that optimizes SSD memory, the feature is called "TRIM". See screenshot below:

And we would need to know more about the brand of drive you have to advise more about Trim. If you can automate it as Jim showed, that's best. In my case, I did a drive upgrade and I have to run it on my various SSD drives manually.

Wonderful people,

Defragmenting may well be the answer. The SSD shows total fragmentation. I'm defragmenting now and will report back here when done.

You folks are wonderful.

Thanks a gang, Mario. That was like a guided
tour through twenty years of tech assists for,
"What the heck's wrong with this thing?"
BTW, I was told this fall, in a year, MS would be
no longer be supporting 7. I bought a reconditioned
lap with 10. How coincidental -- have been going
through control panel and CCleaner, uninstalling
my heart out.

SSD defragmentation is something you can select in Auslogic's Diskdefragment software; must be something to it.

If your windows installation sucks at some point, Tweaking.com's Windows Repair AIO helped me out quite often, especially regarding permission issues it's a great help towards defaulting the settings. There's a portable version of if and IMO a must have ..

I am also a fan of Spybot- Search and Destroy, better than Malwarebytes? But be aware to get the real thing, there was a fake company using that name sometime ago. -F

Defrag is a series of reads and writes. SSDs have a finite number of writes allowed. A large number, but still a finite number. Never defrag an SSD, as you will use up many of those write events in doing so. In fact, defrag is really a useless utility and I never defrag a drive, ever. It ONLY serves to load a program into RAM a tad bit faster, but too many people don't understand that programs run in RAM and your drive is just storage. (That's what the CPU does, moves programs from storage to RAM where they execute.) I have all the time in the world. If a program takes 1.39 seconds longer to load, so what? Also, NTFS drives do not care about fragmentation like FAT32 drives did. Yes, the drive spins more, and that was always the hook for shady techs to charge people money was to sell them the idea that your hard drive will "last longer if it spins less", failing to include the fact that during defrag, your drive spins like a top. Or a dreidel for our Jewish users.

But as usual, because it's me saying it, about 79 people will now jump up and tell me I am wrong, so.....whatever. That's just the opinion of a guy who spent decades as an IT network tech.....

Eddie, that comment completely sucks! Just kidding. Spot on for me.

Yeah Steve, defrag is one of those pieces of IT folklore that became gospel for people who want to sound like they know about computers. The same with "update your drivers". Nobody seems to understand that if a driver worked yesterday, just because there was an update today your old driver doesn't stop working. An update may fix some minor flaw, but drivers don't stop working unless something leaks into your computer and corrupts that exact spot on the drive where that one tiny little bit of software lives. Most can't even explain what a driver is, but they know that they need to be updated!!!

But once again, they know more than someone holding both an MCSE and CCNE, right, so....

SMDH.

Solid state drives are great. The load fast, all of that. Why do I need to care about that when I NEVER turn my computers off? I am currently sitting at a computer that hasn't been restarted since the last round of Windows 10 updates forced me to restart, and while I was booting, I went and got some iced tea from the fridge. Most of that comes from a place of "It's what I do so it is THE WAY to do things. Und you veel do it zee vay I do it!!!