Back up everything and replace the hard drive immediately.

I bought a renewed Lenovo from Amazon and have been very happy with it. Looked almost new and great performance for $270 shipped.

https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-...id=1589319570&sr=8-3

Lenovo ThinkCentre M92p Business Desktop Computer - Intel Core i7 Up to 3.9GHz, 16GB RAM, 480GB SSD, Windows 10 Pro (Renewed)

If it was me and I was laid off and couldn’t afford a new computer, I wouldn’t spend money on stuff now as it won’t help much.

Here’s what I would do as a stop gap:
Figure out what programs are being loaded up during start up. Disable them from loading.
What virus software are you running? Norton and Mcafee are resource hogs. Kill them and use a freebie or kill the virus program if you’re not going to connect to the internet.

After boot up, run program manager to see what programs /processes are running in the background.

My 3 year old computer had been running slow, I saw there were like several instances of realtek or another name always running and keeping my cpu at 100% making my laptop unresponsive. I googled the name and, apparently, it’s a little known issue with Dell that someone wrote in bitcoin mining software as part of the code. I disabled that program (something about going into my computer/devices/ and disabling the drivers.

That fixed my laptop. I, too, was wondering if I had to buy a new laptop. It was bought in 2017.

Bob ,
Download MX linux ) FREE ) and burn to a dvd - go into BIOS and set your puter to boot from dvd drive - place dvd in the burner and switch on - follow very simple instructions and voila - a very fast virus free operating system that just works and does not mine your data for sale .
beat .

Thank you all for the quick and knowledgable responses. I will take all of them under advisement. We mostly run Word, Excel and connect to the internet with this machine. Sounds like the first thing I need to do is back everything up.
I like the idea of buying a cheap refurbished computer, we definitely could use another one. My wife alway leaves 40 - 50 tabs open on AOL and I think this may be a big part of the performance problem. They suck-up about 2GB of memory.

Bob,

I was able to install Windows 10 on a computer that originally ran Windows XP by using the following Web site:

https://dellwindowsreinstallat...uide.com/windows-10/

I second what others have said about looking for a used or refurbished computer. They are rather inexpensive.

If you would like to keep the current computer, I think you would learn a lot of good information by replacing the Hard Drive with a Solid State Drive and installing either Windows 10 or Linux.

You can purchase a Windows 7 Certificate of Authenticity (C.O.A.) off of ebay and have the seller e-mail you the product key. You can then use the product key for the install.

If you purchase a Windows 7 Pro product key you will be able to install Windows 10 Pro.

They keys are taken off of machines that have been recycled and will allow you to activate Windows 10.

By the way, Dell has really good information on its Support Web site on how to replace the drive on most of their machines. So you can look there for instructions on how to replace the drive.