I have an old laptop, an Acer Aspire E1 Z5WE1 NXMEPEK Laptop E1-570 Intel i5 CPU (8 GB RAM, Windows 10), that until recently was running fine. But sometime in the past few weeks, it's developed two faults, which may be connected to each other, I don't know. These two faults are:
Fault 1 - When I double click on a program, or a game, or a text file on the desktop, etc, then there is a pause of about eight or ten seconds, with the Windows 10 swirling circle swirling around, before the game (or program, or text file, etc) begins to load. After this pause, though the program or game loads as normal and plays at full speed and with no problems. And when I exit the program, or game, etc, then when I double click on a different program, game, etc, then the ten seconds or so of swirling circle reappears, before the laptop starts to load the game/program/etc.
Prior to this fault appearing, a few weeks ago, whenever I double clicked on a game or program, etc, then it would start to load immediately, as it normally should.
Fault 2 - When I use the web browser Brave on the laptop, then after opening say a dozen pages (whether I leave all the pages open, or I close one before opening another) then the web pages stop opening, it's as though the web signal stops getting through. This also happens if I use Firefox instead (I've not tried a third browser on the laptop yet). Every other item in my house that can connect to the web (my desktop PC, my tablet, my game consoles, etc) works fine, it's just the laptop that displays this problem. Again, up until a few weeks back, this problem didn't exist, and I could open new pages without problem. My laptop is wirelessly connected to the router, as are the other things.
The laptop seems to be working fine other than these two problems, Windows 10 is up to date, and the laptop is always plugged in, so it's presumably not a battery related issue. Both Malwarebytes and Avast! antivirus show the laptop as being uninfected, the laptop has two SSD drives (one of which has replaced the DVD drive, via an internal hard drive caddy, months ago, so not related to these problems), and no mechanical drive. I have run
chkdsk C: /F /X
and
SFC /Scannow
and
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
with no errors detected. I don't want to reformat and reinstall everything, because there are many games and programs installed, and other than these two faults, everything seems fine.
Any ideas or suggestions, please?
