On 1/26/20 1:59 PM, Dale Elshoff WB8CJW wrote:

Hi Mike, can you provide any suggestions of how to reduce/eliminate freeze problems and improve pc performance?  I don't think stepping back to Windows 8 would be easy or necessarily productive but I'm willing to try about anything that has worked for others.  Maybe you know of a utility that would optimize the system.  I've used IO-Bit products, CCleaner, MalwareBytes from time to time.  Avast anti-virus probably knocks the performance way down but have to put up with that or something these days.

Dale,

When I decided to give Win10 a "fair shake" since I was a committed Linux user (first Ubuntu, now Linux Mint) I did a "reset" or "restore" - whatever Windows calls it.  ASUS in all their wisdom, cluttered the Win10 with all sorts of unnecessary apps.  Of course, I did a complete image first with Clonezilla so I could restore the HD to prior state. Once the image was created, Once the reset completed, I went through all the installed apps and deleted what I did not need as again Windows/ASUS apps appeared.  This made it easy for me to control Win10.  As for the HP system, I owned a Win7 DVD that I reinstalled with and allowed it to upgrade to Win8 then 8.1.  Again making sure nothing was installed that I did not want.  Both systems have been rock solid since then.  It is now to the point that I can bounce between Linux Mint and Windows on both systems with just a HD swap and the copying of 3 directories - my photos, my data files and my Thunderbird email.  My music collection it too big (350+ Gigs) to copy, so it live in parallel partitions on all the HDs.  To help keep everything in synch, Dropbox plays a big part.

I really think that the clean environment I put together for both these systems are the keys to creating a stable platform.  My third system, an i5 desktop was a homebrew with a virgin install of Windows. It's stability is what led me down the path I followed.

--
Mike