Inspiron 15 3542 slow

The CPU is i3 not Pentium or atom. The hard drive is a real drive. Not flash. I know because I have taken it out. I have technical knowledge. I don't thing my model has diagnostics from partition. I like looked at drive management. Only see the 100 MB Windows 7 makes and the Dell Recovery. I have all partitions backed up with true image.

Setting bios to defaught is not going to help bootup time

The diagnostics can be run from a partition on the hard drive (part of it resides in BIOS setup and a basic diagnostic will run even without the partition being there).  The drivers disc also allows running the diagnostics as it is bootable.

It may be a clean install will help somewhat, but bear in mind this is more of a notebook-style tablet than a true notebook computer.  The system uses an older, slower Pentium-class (more like Atom-class) CPU and either comes with an embedded flash drive or a slow conventional hard drive.  There's not much you can do to mitigate those issues -- this is really a Windows answer to a chromebook more than it is anything else.

try setting ur BIOS to factory default settings. fixed my problem in win 10. so maybe it will help.

for help and support call on toll free 1-888-502-0597

The i3 is still a low-end CPU - and a hard drive is quite a bit slower than flash memory in an SSD.

If there is no Dell diagnostic partition on the hard drive, it was removed after the the system was shipped from Dell -- all Dell systems ship with a diagnostic partition from the factory and have for many years now.

my windows 10 machine went from abt 30 seconds to 10 seconds boot up. when i do a restart it is alot slower.

so , my machine says it does help, dramatically....

my machine also has the i3, wouldnt call it low end either. its the 3rd fastest class of cpu that intel has to offer.

Yes there is a 39.19 FAT16 Dell Utility partition. It does not show up in Windows Disk Management. In Ubuntu it does not show the 100 MB Windows 7 boot partition. While UBuntu was booting it was real slow also. Somthing came up about a crash report. Now this really concerns me. Before I format I am about to do some other things to check. 

That is the Dell diagnostic partition.  Pressing F12 a few times immediately after the power button should bring up a menu that lets you enter the diagnostics.

I am not going to call and stay on the phone all afternoon talking to someone I can hardly understand. It is easier to use chat but that is closed on weekends for some unknown reason. They are closed I will use this forum. I am going to go ahead and proceed with reinstalling the OS with the DVD. Then drivers ETC. I think it will be faster. I believe what slows it down is the Dell backup and recovery and also maybe Dell Support it's always trying to run something from Dell. I said I had computer knowledge it is mostly hardware I know about. I still have a hard time believing this system is a ow end model. My hard drive model is

WDC WD5000LPVX-75VOTTO (500 GB) 

Processor Intel (R) Core (TM) i3-4005U CPU @ 1.70 Ghz

Memory is 4096 MB.

I know the memory can be upgraded to 8 GB I am not sure if I can upgrade the CPU. There is only one slow for memory I was upset with Dell about that. This system is more than a low end system. It cost over $500.00.The system rating is 5.1 In device manager it shows 4 CPU's that is because they are hyper thread. My friend has a older model Studio XPS 1558 and his rating is lower than mine. I believe we did a clean install on his and it was faster. I have all the partitions backed up with acornis true image and it does restore them I tried it on another drive to check before I did all of this. If its still slow I will think about getting a SSD and more memory. About the Diagnostic DVD I can boot to I think the Diagnostics only run on a Vostro I booted to the command typed DELLDIAG and it reboots.

Thanks for the help I will keep this topic updated.

You may or may not  be able to upgrade to 8G, but the official support is 4G only -- not 8.

The CPU is permanently soldered to the system board, so any upgrade will require a complete system board replacement.

ejn63, I am about to look and see if there is a Diagnostics partition with a UBUNTU Linux disk.

Yes i's the dell diagnostics partition. I have wiped the drive. After wiping the drive the diagnostics still ran. It even ran the extended even without the diagnostic partition. Not sure why it was there. But I reinstalled the OS and with no drivers installed boot time is about 30-35 seconds. I am about to install drivers now.

Bear in mind that Windows 7 is up for several hundred megabytes in patches -- the result will be a slower system but the security patches are required.

It is OK it will not take long. The OS DVD is S P1. Also I have ie 11 downloaded already. Speaking of ie 11 when I got this turned it on the first time it was installed already. Dell has a bunch of the patches in the recovery. But I do not want all the junk ware Dell installs.  I have a feeling one of those programs that ties to run from Dell slows it down. I had a Compaq Presario with Windows 98 once something called backweb that checks for updates would cause it to crash all the time.