I have an ageing Dell Inspiron. Must be 5-6 years old by now. Tag on the bottom says that it originally came with WIN 8. I bought it new and have continually updated. Of course I am now running WIN 10. My Inspiron has 8 Gigs memory, a 1TB HD, Intel 2 core i7-4510u @ 2.0Ghz. That seems like it is still fairly well equipped, but to be honest I have not paid much attention to computer specs lately.

So the reason for the post. The computer is starting to give me grief! It is becoming slow to respond, often showing programs as "not responsive" and I have to wait until id does respond. I don't "think" that I have a virus, but I would like to run some tests to find out for sure if there is anything that needs to be cleaned. I run Avast free, as well as the Microsoft Defender and an occasional run of Malwarebytes. Nothing shows as a problem with these.

So are there steps that I can take to check my system? Or is the Dell just telling me that it's time to replace?