I think my hard drive is going to die.

My laptop takes 15 minutes to start up and it takes a fucking long time to open any program but once they're opened they run pretty well... And it does since two weeks ago!

This is a hdd related problem, isn't it?

Hold a really strong magnet against the hdd. This resets the drive and makes it faster again.

(Please don't do that)

@ruhe lol thanks for help, i'll try.

(Kidding)

If it’s a HDD, not SSD, then yes it’s most likely a hdd on its way out, especially if it’s at the 7 year mark, that’s a pretty good life.

You can run hdd diagnostics to see if it’s starting to report any issues.

@dmonkey another sneak trick: physically unmount your hdd and apply some mirror cleaner to the disk. This removes all pollutions (viruses, etc.).

Another one: did you consider overclocking the hdd's motor? That's typically the #1 solution regarding slow hdd speeds

If you use a S.M.A.R.T tools to check the current values, I bet that both the "Seek Error Rate" and the "Reallocation Event Count" have already reached astronomical values.

Do a full backup and exchange that drive. Now.

@C0D4 did with smartctl and it looks ok... I'll do deeper tests another time. Thanks, anyway

@ruhe ... with salty water obviously lol

Have you considered defragmenting? If the hdd were bad, you'd probably start getting errors and unreadable/corrupted files.
Since that isn't happening, it's probably just very fragmented, which causes the read head to travel a lot looking for pieces of files, causing massive delays.
Since the smart reports nothing wrong, I'd go for defragmenting first (after you've made a backup first)

intel optane?

Devrant != StackExchange
Devrant != Helpdesk
Have you tried turning it off and on a several times, throwing it, kicking it then gave up and reinstall OS?

Nah, it's a patience problem

@geronimo Nice Necro! 😁