Slow Notebook PC - Help Brendan

What is the processor, clock speed, how much memory, how much space original/used on hard disc? Any supplementary discs to the main hard drive?

Start off by settings.. control panel.. system.. advanced.. performance - click on Adjust for Best Performance. This will not do much, but will do a little whilst you are looking around.

(..system..general tab for processor type and clock speed)
(task manager..performance tab will tell you how much physical memory you have)
 
The performance you report is not consistent with the spec of your machine. With 2/3 of HD available, defragging your disk might give something, but it doesnt sound like disk performance. Are you familiar with Task Manager. I would use that in the first instance to get some idea of what is going on whilst these long delays are occuring. Task Manager..Processes Tab - two clicks on CPU will display processes taking up CPU time. TM..Performance tab will show PF usage. See what is going on whilst something slow taking place which used to be fast.

And what OpSys are you using, and is it Updated as far as it should be.

Do you have a Virus checker, and is it scheduled to be doing a full check whilst you are using the machine - that will destroy performance.
 
For what it's worth and not knowing the entire story, 256MB RAM is insufficient for most apps these days. In fact, I'm quite surprised that the supplier of your Laptop allowed a fairly high spec P4 to leave the shop with anything less than 512MB.

You may be able to compensate slightly with an appropriately configured ‘fixed’ Page File (virtual memory) but more physical Memory always helps.

Cheers, Melangeoff...
 
You can try loading and running ccleaner, and running both the cleaner and issues part of it, and maybe also running a dedicated registry cleaner such as RegSeeker, then running Disk defragmenter from Sytem Tools.

This will give an indication of whether it just needed a good cleanup, or needs something more.

It will never get back to your original speed of 3 years ago, as has already been mentioned, RAM is low for what you are running, and RAM is always a major bottleneck, and it would be well worthwhile upgrading
 
Re: Slow Notebook PC - I had the same problem

I had the same problem - did everything "just so" being in IT and all that, but the problem was really easy to fix: buy an Apple Mac. Now, for one full year, I've not had a single minute of my life wasted trying to solve slowdowns, crashes, buggy software ... and I've been kicking myself ever since for not having wised up years ago. /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
Re: Slow Notebook PC - I had the same problem

I am not surprised at the lack of speed. XP Pro has minimum spec of 256 . ideally 512.
Put in More Ram> If not use Windows 2000, which does almost all of XP without the overhead
 
Re: Slow Notebook PC - I had the same problem

just the person to help me then.

I've got an Apple Powerbook 520, and it's REALLY slow. Maybe you can help me speed it up?

CPU Speed: 25 MHz
Maximum RAM: 36 MB
Hard Drive: 320 MB

I've got the maximum amount of RAM in it, and I can't update the OS anymore
 
Steve,
I am running XP Pro and they have upgraded mine from 512mb ram to 2.0gb ram (max), and to be honest, it hasn't really made much difference - if I wasn't there when they did it, I probably wouldn't know. Mine isn't as powerful processor as yours, just 1.70ghz. I recently upgraded to SP2 and that has made mine a lot slower than before, nothing to do with PC spec, just the OS. The cleaners and defragging doesn't seem to help either... but, being as mine isn't actually mine, belongs to work, reformatting and starting again is definitely not an option - far too much trouble and I am not going through that again... bad enough when they changed me on to a different domain!
 
Re: Slow Notebook PC - I had the same problem

very, very old. Just making the point that even Mac machines don't keep up with bloated newer operating systems, and have a finite life.
 
Ram will make a big difference to many machines, but there are many other factors.

One of the best ways to speed up a machine is to def start from scratch, and reinstall OS. However, as you say, not an option for many.

The best you can do is ameliorate the problem, and running cleaners and defrag will certainly help.

There is no way to restore many computers to the way they ran one or two years ago, as the demands of OS and apps become higher.

One of the few ways around it (not in your case) is to use OS, apps, browsers, antivirus, that are not as resource hungry. Nice lightweight Linux, pared down browser, OpenOffice instead of Office, dump Norton etc etc. but this brings all sorts of issues to the casual user, rather than the geeks that are prepared to work at it. So most people will continue to use the defaults for now, unless they are willing to experiment and learn a bit. In the meantime, most will just carry on upgrading computers every few years to cope with the new demands, and take advantage of faster cpu's, faster and larger memory, and faster and larger hard drives.
 
Steve
have noticed just lately that i have had quite a few systems in running slow, i ran avg to clean up just in case and found nothing then i ran the MS updates and lo and behold everything started speeding up. i suspect that ms update have been down loading something that has taken quite a bit of resource and they have done something to address this, have also noted that quite a few systems, when i do diskchk, show bad sectors, i then change the HD and everything is sweet.
Stu
 
Thats part of the problem, being works... they put god knows how many programs on there for security, antivirus, etc, etc. Mine is better than some there though - mines only 18mths old, and we only get new ones every 5yrs, so it is only going downhill from now on /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif. There is always at least 70 processes running, and thats without any program open!

They surprise me sometimes though, we have all the new programs and are continously being upgraded on certain things, yet we still have Office97 - somewhat rather out of date now.

Can't really complain, it does me for my job OK, and take it home each evening and ues it to come on here... VPN software and free connection/phone number software is a real bonus - that saves me using my own PC on the net, and a few quid each month! /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
They had a great scheme at one company I worked for. We all bought our own computers to company requirements, and were paid for use with monthly rebates or summat, can't remember how it worked exactly. Two years later they decided the scheme wasn't as tax effective as they thought, so issued us all with new company laptops, and we all owned our previous laptops!

Company computers are a different issue though, as they have to some extent lock them down to similar standards so they can all co-exist on the network, so is a different ball game to home users who can make choices based on most current information. Even huge IT firms are way behind, because rolling out latest updates means huge amounts of work checking compatibilities etc.
 
I am quite unrestricted in some respects with my laptop... being a laptop it isn't constrained to quite as tight policies and I can change practically anything and update everything myself... you can't do anything on the desktops, but they are used by multiple users whereas the laptop is only myself.

As long as I don't install non-business related software they are quite happy /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif.
 
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