Solid State hard drives are expensive but very responsive. I'm sure that someone else can explain the technical differences,it's related to the way the data on the drive is accessed.

Have you run a hard drive diagnostic to see if yours has gone bad? The instructions are different for each brand of laptop but usually includes shutting down completely and upon pressing the start button you tap a function key (F12 for Lenovo) until you reach a screen BIOS screen with options for hard drive tools.

I agree with Dan. Replacing the hard drive under the circumstances you describe is very likely not necessary. PCs can accumulate garbage and baggage over time if you're not diligent about limiting what gets downloaded and installed. Likely a good clean up (there are programs to do this) and a large reduction of what's set up to load on boot-up is all that's needed.

When is the last time you did a disc defragment? When mine runs slow, I do that and it helps a lot. Quite often as well, there will be many programs that are unnecessarily running in the background. Turn those off (you do ctrl-alt-delte to show the programs) and it'll run faster. I've never paid anyone to fix my computer problems. It's usually something quick and easy to do on your own. YouTube has excellent tutorials if you're nervous about it.

Unless a diagnostic reported you have bad sectors in the hard drive I certainly would not replace it. I would look at cleaning out stuff that has accumulated as mentioned and I would check on the ability to add more RAM.

Give the stats on the laptop so we can see what you are working with. I like belarc it's free and will give you all the information about what is in the laptop and it has a hard drive health check.

Belarc

My husband says that depending what the computer is being used for (online vs. a housed program) some of the most common things for slowing it down are

1. the need to be defragmented as already pointed out

2. a mailbox stored on the drive like Outlook is too full

3. malware or a virus

4. the need to delete cache, cookies and so on from the browser.

5. Simply shutting down the computer, rebooting and ensuring all your programs like Windows, your browser, adobe and so on are up to date.

I'm not saying this is what your issue is, but they are certainly things you should check into.

A couple of times the screen is black when I fire it up. It did it the other day when I had it in at a computer shop, discussing something else. The techie said that hard drives do wear out, and this is our main computer that we use for streaming etc.

Chrome is very slow, which is unusual. It takes time for some sites to open, and sometimes crashes.

I de-frag and scans are all up-to-date. Windows update is current.

Windows 7. 64-bit 4 GB RAM Asus computer

I use Chrome and Opera, both can be finicky.

I use yahoo email, not outlook.

SuperantiSpyware, Malwarebytes and AVG installed.

Laptop is 4 1/2 years old. It's slowed down considerably since it was new.

I now get a pop-up telling me to upgrade to Windows 10, which I don't want to do. Must be from me updating windows.

The pop up can be dismissed and ignored, that's what I've been doing (I have no interest in making the change, I'll deal with it on my next new PC).

Why do you have so many security programs? There's overlap and there could be interference, you really only need one good one. I'd delete Superantispyware (not that highly regarded anyway), suspend Malwarebytes and AVG for a session, and see what performance is like. Report back.

(Also, as before, I wonder how many items are loading on boot up. If you don't know how to deal with this, please say so and I or someone else can talk you through looking at that.)

I love to reset browsers to default when they get sluggish. In Chrome, it's under advanced settings. Warning, this will remove all of your plugins and extensions. Take this advice with a grain of salt. I once had someone really freak out after resetting Firefox because he had to reset his home page and add his extensions back.

Don't forget to delete IE browser cache, even if you don't use it. Windows does use IE and stores temp files there.

Speaking of temp files, before you defragment, clear out your Windows Temp files. Click start, type in run and press enter. Now type in %temp% and press enter. There shouldn't be anything in here that you need and you might be surprised at how much has built up in there.

Good suggestion, nothing to lose.

I just looked at my temp folders (AppData %Temp% and Hola which is a VPN that I use has 22,761 KB. That seems awful large. I'll delete everything that's there.

Yikes some of them say that I need Administrator's permission to delete this file. A number of others say that the file couldn't be found. God I hate computers.

Snidely, the computer guy wonders why I have so many virus programs as well. I explained that SAS works along with the anti-virus; and Malwarebytes has always been recommended here. I could delete that one I suppose because it has never ever found anything when I do a scan, but the other day the warning window popped up, so I should probably keep it.

I can't see how to set Opera to default. Before I do, does it (and Chrome) delete all of my bookmarks and speed dial (shortcut) pages?

Resetting Chrome doesn't erase bookmarks. You may need to enable the bookmarks and the apps toolbar by right clicking in the toolbar area and clicking to select those specific toolbars. I wish that I could assist with Opera, but I've never used it.

I'm going to play around with it some more as per your suggestions and see if it needs to go in. I'm not sure how to just 'disable' SuperantiSpyware. I can click Exit and it doesn't show up on the taskbar but I don't know if it's disabled.

I use SAS from time to time and yes, exiting closes it down. I also keep malwarebytes, but that too I exit when not in use. The only security program I keep running is my av/firewall security suite.

I also use ccleaner to keep everything clean. I've used it a long time. It's a good program, and has a lot of tools to do basic clean-up tasks. For example, if you aren't good at finding the start-up routine, ccleaner has an easy-to-use tool for managing your start-up programs. If you haven't yet, try it out. Cnet always gives it top ratings.