I built my parents a glorified Facebook machine that, about a year later, now takes about 10 minutes to restart and runs like a paraplegic despite almost nothing being installed with less than 25% of the HDD being used. Clearing temp files and running malware scans doesn't improve its sluggish behavior; is there anything I've been too exceptional to check?
Check startup items (msconfig on Win7, part of the task manager on Win10)
Check startup services (msconfig, services, hide all windows services, untick anything you recognize that you know is worthless. anything you don't recognize, google or ask here)
Check task scheduler (this is more for looking for any potential malware payloads that avoided heuristics)
Check idle temps, if it's super dusty inside it's possible the CPU is throttling to avoid overheating and just needs a can of air
Test performance from a liveCD
Reinstall Windows
Check resmon for:
High number of hard faults/sec under the memory tab - If there are a lot, you are having a memory starvation problem.
Reported amount of disk I/O - If it's pegged in the megabytes/second then something's hammering your HDD and causing an I/O bottleneck, if that's the case you can expand the disk tab, sort by total IO, and find out what process/file call is causing it.
CPU Usage - Self explanatory
You can also use something like
ProcMon to get a general idea of what all is happening on a PC. It's a little overwhelming at first, but ignoring the actual operations and just seeing what holds the highest amount of activity helps narrow it down.
What, if any, advantages do hybrid SSHDDs have over regular HDDs?
You get the speeds of an SSD for the partition on it that's on the NAND. Otherwise, nothing.
The "Don't put magnets near computers" mantra is one that came from the Good Old Days™ of CRT Displays and Magnetic Disk media storage. It's way less of a problem than it was a long time ago.
Things that are okay around normal magnets:
-Anything you'd find in a modern computer.
Things that are not okay around high powered magnets (electromagnets, neodimyum, et al):
-Anything in any computer.
Things that are not okay around normal magnets:
-CRT monitors
-Cassette Storage Tapes (Including 8-Track, VHS, Music Tapes, LTO cassettes, et al)
-Floppy disks (All standard sizes)
-Oldschool Hard Disks
Not to mention most laptops nowadays have a magnet sitting right next to the hard drive that it uses for an electromagnetic lid sensor
