Every PCs slow down over time—whether you’re using an Acer Aspire E15 laptop or a Predator gaming desktop—it doesn’t matter. But don’t worry, there are ways to make things faster. We’ve identified 8 potential reasons for a slow Acer PC, along with similar fixes on how to speed up AGAIN on your Acer PC.
There are plenty of reasons why a PC can run slowly or freeze randomly (especially your PC just upgraded to Windows 10), some fixes work better than others based on the situation of your Acer machine, but we’ll show you how to fix it quickly.
Our objective is simple: you know for yourself how to diagnose and speed things up, you don’t have to waste time and cash on a trip to a nearby repair store.
But in some situations, you will have to, for example, if your Acer laptop cannot be turned on or Windows is frozen.
Anyway, we hope you can find this troubleshooting guide helpful.
1. Restart your laptop
If your laptop has not restarted recently, make sure to reboot it before performing any of the methods below. This is a good way, but rebooting helps clear out its memory and make sure that any errant services or processes that are running get shut down.
2. You’ve got virus or malware
Windows PCs are vulnerable to virus or malware infection. When your Acer laptop is operating incredibly slowly, it can be resulted from malware running in the background—consuming machine resources (CPU, memory, etc.).
Note: it could be Adware installed into your browser by inserting irritating flash ads, for example.
How to fix it: search and delete any malware threats embedded in your device. You may use the built-in Windows Defender for this reason, but we prefer Bitdefender Antivirus Plus because it is more effective and simpler to use. Only update it on your PC, run a comprehensive system scan, diagnose and clean up all the threats you’ve identified.
3. Update the drivers
The missing or outdated device drivers can slow down your Acer laptop, so you should make sure that your device drivers are up to date.
You can update your device drivers manually by visiting the Acer Official site, then searching for BIOS updates, manuals, drivers and other downloads for your Acer laptop. Ensure to seelect the drivers that are compatible with your Windows version.
If you don’t have time or patience, you can do it automatically with Driver Easy. Driver Easy is an excellent program that you can update your drivers with more quickly.
4. Upgrade your RAM
Installing more RAM is one of the best methods to increase your Acer laptop speed and performance. If your Acer laptop has less than 4GB of RAM, when the memory is exhausted, your laptop will be much slower performance. If you play games or use video editing programs that need to store large amounts of information in memory for quick access, it would recommend you have at least 8GB.
To check the RAM usage, go to the Performance stats in the Task Manager. If your RAM usage is at 100% all the time, you probably need to buy more RAM to fix the problem.
5. Battery problems freeze your Acer
For those of you who are using an Acer laptop, and the keyboard or mouse pad often freezes up and becomes unresponsive, or you can’t shut down Windows after pressing the power button, it’s likely that your battery has some problems.
first of all, start your computer in “Safe Mode”. If you are not sure how to proceed. Open Device Manager and expand Batteries. Now disable the entry Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery. Save and restart your Acer in regular mode. This should solve the problem. If the frozen issue persists, shut down your computer, flip it over, remove the battery and put it back, restart the system and check again.
If you are using an Acer laptop, and your keyboard or mouse frequently freezes and seems unresponsive, or you can’t shut down Windows by clicking the power button, it’s possible that your battery has issues.
How to fix it: First of all, launch your machine in “Safe Mode.” If you’re not sure how to continue, see this Microsoft article. Open Device Manager and expand the Batteries section. Disable the Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery entry now. Save and restart the Acer in normal mode. This is supposed to fix the problem. If the freezing continues, shut down the device, turn it over, remove the battery and position it back in place, restart the machine, and check again.
6. Your hard drive is almost full
Nothing slows down a computer than a lack of free disk space. If you can unload it, you’re bound to see some performance boost. The hard part is that there is no minimum value on free space, but you can try to have at least 20 percent usable, i.e. 20GB free of 100GB of hard drive storage.
How to fix it: Clean up your hard drive. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it seems, and you may need to do it manually. For example, scanning and deleting huge duplicates, uninstalling inactive programs, clearing browser junk files, etc. If you like the simpler approach, try CleanMyPC—a smart app that will keep your Acer clean automatically.
7. Overheating lags overall performance
It’s normal for a machine to heat up, and you don’t have to think about it much of the time. But constant overheating will cause the system to slow down, to hang up, and worse—to crash.
How to fix it: First, see if you usually play video games or use your Acer for intense picture and video editing, if so, aim to reduce the duration. Since gaming and related programs need more CPUs and GPUs (graphic cards) while operating, thereby raise the hardware temperature.
Then, check if your Acer vents or heatsinks to see if they’re clogged. If yes, clean it with a soft brush (make sure you do it gently to avoid damaging other components). Often, if you’re using a laptop, consider getting a cooling mat or pad. For desktop computers, be careful not to place the mainframe in a high-temperature environment.
8. Network & web browser is dragging you down
Perhaps the slowness problem is not due to your Acer, but to the speed of your network. If you’re wired to a Wi-Fi that has little bandwidth, odds are your web surfing won’t be that smooth. Often, heavy, stubborn web browsers will slow you down as they seem to take more time to load websites.
How to speed it up:
- Test on another machine to see if the network is good enough. If it turns out to be the cause, please call your Internet service provider and let them deal with the issue.
- When using the web browser, consider using less tabs, add-ons, etc.—this will slow you down significantly if you use Firefox.
- Clear the browsing history, caches, redundant plugins. It helps to lighten the browser as well.
9. Outdated or failing hardware is killing it
Hardware (memory, hard disk, etc.) tax efficiency more if you’re using an old Acer Aspire. Not to mention that the bottleneck could be caused by volume/capacity. For eg, Windows 8 needs at least 4GB of RAM to run smoothly (more for Windows 10). Also, a broken or fragmented hard drive will severely weigh down your Acer, too.
How to fix it: Repair or replace hardware parts. If your Acer frequently crashes on third party systems, consider adding more RAM (memory chips). If your hard disk has a limited capacity or becomes defective, replace it with a solid-state drive (SSD).
Warning: when installing new hardware, it is strongly recommended that you ask someone geeky to help—to prevent problems.
10. Your Acer has quality issues
In rare cases, the slow performance of Acer can be due to consistency issues. Especially when your Acer is brand new and you haven’t installed a lot of applications.
What to do: Please contact Acer Customer Service instantly and order maintenance or replacement, depending on the warranty guarantee. Note: be mindful that you do not want to install any operating system other than Windows (e.g. Linux) on your own, as this could jeopardize your credentials for free services. In case you need to, here’s the official link to get in contact with Acer Support.
There are several options to speed up your Acer laptop, based on your model specs and other aspects (age, using habits, etc). We’ve heard a lot of times that reformatting the whole Windows setup is the only way to go, but that’s just not true.
If you just want to improve your laptop capacity and pay less attention to costs, we will suggest that you try to upgrade your Acer’s hard drive to a solid-state drive (SSD).
