I have a few customers who are running a third party program and they often complain of slowness when the program searches and even freezes at points. The computers are running i7 3.2ghz with 16 GB memory on a 1 terabyte hard drive. The performance of the actual computer is great. I am in no way a SQL Admin, I can navigate through it and write basic queries like inner joins. Are there any settings in SQL Server Express that I can modify to help performance wise?
Are you using indexes? if you have large data and you are trying to search for something other than the primary key, then you need some kind of indexes. If you can share the query, I may help.