mutantpoodle wrote:the speed appears to come and go without help re time of day etc
thats why I thought the speedtests would tell me of problems, but they so very varied its of no use
And possibly not relevant. As you mentioned your laptop is 8 years old it's worth checking the state of your hard drive. Do this:
Open the file explorer and right-click on your C: drive and select Properties. (How full is your disk?) Then select the Tools tab and click Check.
If that shows errors then it's time for a new hard drive! If it all comes up clean, then do this:
Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete. That is, hold down both the Ctrl and Alt keys and, while still holding those two down, press the Del(ete) key.
You'll get a blue screen menu. Click on Task Manager. Then, in the Task Manager (at the bottom), click on More details.
That'll show you what is running on your system and how much of various resources each task is taking. Keep Task Manager running all the time and when your system is going slowly bring it to the front and look to see which task(s), if any, is hogging resources. You can click on the headings (CPU, Memory, Disk, etc) to sort the column and so easily bring the biggest user to the top so you can identify the culprit.