Laptop slowdowns?

[dchakrab]

My friend's laptop has this problem...even after a reformat / reinstall, it's REALLY slow. The machine runs about 1.3 Ghz, if i remember right, but it's incredibly slow...scrolling down on a webpage, for example, is blocky and you have to wait for it. It's MUCH slower than even a 500 mhz machine ought to be, from experience.

Machine also hangs often, running XP Pro, under normal to low cpu loads (mostly browser windows, norton running in the background, nothing else up). Moving the machine with the wireless card in it also hangs it immediately. All updates are installed on it, as far as i know, including SP 1.

Anyone have any idea what the problem could be?

Dave.

 

[Medea]

How much memory does it have?

Also, what programs are loading at startup? You may have a lot of unnecessary programs loading and hogging your system. I don't use Norton, but I understand that it has a lot of features that load - might want to check that as well.

 

[Unforgiven]

unless you have 256 megs of ram forget about xp running anything close to smooth on ANY configuration. im guessing you have less than 256.....

 

[dchakrab]

Hmmm. So you guys think a RAM upgrade would be the solution? I'll check it and see...am guessing it's running 256, but it could be 128.

-D.

 

[Medea]

Originally posted by: dchakrab
Hmmm. So you guys think a RAM upgrade would be the solution? I'll check it and see...am guessing it's running 256, but it could be 128.

-D.

Yes. 256 megs are the very least you should have. Ideally, you should have 512 megs.

 

[Unforgiven]

yeah, 256 is really the minimum you should have with xp. even that is a stretch. laptop ram can be pricey and frankly id just install windows 2000 instead, but thats just what i would do.

 

[johnjkr1]

You might also want to set XP to "optimise for best performance" instead of "optimise for best visuals"...that basically puts it on the same visual level of win2k. Also, after the format did you properly load all drivers (chipset, video, etc.)? Some machines also require speedstep or amd's speed utility to be installed.

 

[Abhi]

Originally posted by: Unforgiven
yeah, 256 is really the minimum you should have with xp. even that is a stretch. laptop ram can be pricey and frankly id just install windows 2000 instead, but thats just what i would do.

XP runs just fine on a P3 450, with 128 mb ram.

All you need to do is turn off ALL visual effects. Go to www.blackviper.com and do some optimization.....

Also... sounds like another spyware problem to me.

Get Adaware and Spybot. Update both, and run a full scan.