Slow / freezing laptop issues!

[TPMB12]

Work laptop is old and very slow (6 years and over). In an attempt at finding it why I turned off bullguard and switched to Windows defender. I've switched back because bullguard is the designated av and the switch had no effect.

So I went into optimise drives from the windows button. I normally have drives C and D only but this time a third one is present 11% fragmented. It's not got a letter reference but a series of back slashes followed by volume then a number /letter combination. This drive won't defragment when I set it up.

My problem is I can't open that funny new drive so what is it and could it be a problem? I can't defragment it or see it in explorer.

Any ideas what's causing issues? It's not been right since the new os update was it 1709?

[andyoxon]

Try running Glary Utilites, and malwarebytes?   Any browsers with out of date plugins?  Look at resource manager (admin tools) to see which is the most CPU/RAM hungry application when the PC runs slow?

[fuaran]

Run Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc). That will show what drives are attached.
Have you got any removable drives plugged in, eg a USB stick/phone/camera/GPS etc. Or maybe a network drive, or a folder mounted as a drive.

[TPMB12]

Only thing plugged in is a mouse dongle. Looking at one of the system tools it showed only C, D and optical disc drive. Only on defrag did it show the suspicious drive at 11% fragmented.

Nothing was running high when I looked at it last, except for the program doing the monitoring which was very high.