[PieterCasparzen]

My laptop suddenly was less responsive.

The word suddenly is a clue: did you one day create gigabytes of files on your laptop ? If you did not create a lot of huge files all at once, but instead used more disk space gradually over time, as is typical, then there should not "sudddenly" be a change in performance. (this is possible if you were running a database server, but you're not).

I regularly run disc cleanup and defrag, using the built in Win 7 tools. On a whim, I installed Defraggler and it shows my HD 14% fragmented.

Noticeable decrease in responsiveness because of disk fragmentation would only occur when reading or writing the disk.

Disk reads and writes tend to not to be very large for normal user PC's. The largest would typically be images/pictures. So, for example, once you've read an image file from disk and displayed it on the screen, the disk I/O is done.

If the unresponsiveness goes on pretty much all the time, i.e., your PC is just doggy, herky-jerky, etc., then you've got either malware (you picked up from a web ad, email, etc.) running and don't know it, or some of the applications you run have problems.

Is only your web browsing slow ? other applications ? or all applications ?

First off, I try disconnecting physically from the internet. Malware can sometimes be feverishly working using your internet connection. You can experiment by disconnecting the wire/cable from the internet is the sure way to stop all your network traffic.

[don-o]

Thanks PC. First thing I did was run MalWarebytes quick scan. Came up clean.

I have done nothing except web surfing.

As I mentioned, she’s pretty much back to normal for responsiveness.