Any computer that has been used regularly for more than a year will start to slow down. This could be because of the hardware problem, but the defragmentation of files on the hard drive is the usual culprit. When files are stored in non-contiguous sectors on the hard drives, the operating system has to spin the hard drive a lot more, the hard drive header has to jump across multiple locations on the drive and this all results in taking too much time when reading or writing files. If the hard drive is taking too much time in file access, then obviously it will impact the performance of the operating system negatively.
In order to speed up your system you can defragment the files on your hard drive using a tool like GlarySoft Disk SpeedUp. This tool is only meant for the hard disk drives (HDD) and should never be used on solid state drives (SDD). When launched, it shows all the partitions on your attached hard drives. You can select any of these partitions and it will display the fragmentation status of the data on the selected partition. In general, the green blocks mean non-fragmented data and red blocks denote fragmented data. If you do not see any red blocks then perhaps you won’t need any defragmenting.
You can choose to defragment the selected partition by clicking on Defrag in the toolbar. If you do not want to defragment the entire hard drive and want to speed up only a folder or a large file, then you can choose Defrag a folder or Defrag a file from the toolbar.
If you do not want to waste time waiting for it to complete the defragmenting process, then you can schedule the task for a time when you are not actively using your computer. These options are available in the Disk SpeedUp settings. You can configure the scheduler to run the defragmenting periodically everyday or every week, at what time and which of the partitions should be targeted.
You can download GlarySoft Disk SpeedUp from https://www.glarysoft.com/disk-speedup/.