Get a can of compressed air and clean the vent ports, do it daily for a week.
Run a pass of chkdsk with the F option on all the drives, use google for the how to.
My Toshiba Satellite #45-B4200 is 2.5 years old. I believe it runs Windows 8.1.
I'm quite simple, just use it for Internet, iTunes (download many songs), store a few TV shows, a little Photoshop, Google Earth, Spotify, and most importantly Microsoft Office.
Recently, loading of Microsoft Office (or simply opening any document) has been incredibly slow. To search 'My Documents' can take from 1-20 minutes simply for the folder to open. And once it opens, it can take up to 5-10 minutes for the document to open. And sometimes I will get a "(Not Responding)" where it just buffers forever and I can't edit it.
I checked my storage space which says "433 GB free of 687 GB" so I don't think storage is slowing it down.
I've been using Google to find ways to try and speed it up but it's all so cluttered and I'm confused. Just looking to answers as to why it takes so long to open a document or browse my documents. It's quite important because I am a teacher and am on Microsoft Office religiously and it pains me to waste so much time waiting just to open a document. It's been a huge problem pulling up worksheets in time.
What could be the problem? Any clear steps to take to improve it?
Also, I don't know life span of laptops, especially this one. Is 2.5 years about time to replace a laptop?

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