Why Is My Laptop So Slow All of a Sudden?
Your laptop was fine last month. Now it takes forever to boot, browsers crawl, and everything stutters. When slowdown hits suddenly, it's usually one of these causes. It Overheats Sudden slowness with loud fans is the classic sign of heat throttling: the processor deliberately slows itself to avoid damage. This often appears out of nowhere when dust finally clogs the cooling system past the tipping point, or when a background process starts hammering the CPU. Check your temperatures first. Then clean the vents and take control of the cooling — the stock fan profile on most laptops prioritizes silence over performance, which is exactly backwards when the machine is cooking itself. This rundown of the best software for fan control covers free tools that let you set proper cooling behavior in minutes. A Runaway Background Process Open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and sort by CPU. If something you don't recognize is eating 50%+ constantly — a stuck updater, a runaway browser...