Toshiba Notebook Performance Troubles

[rbaibich]

I have a Toshiba Satellite 1410-S173 (Celeron 1.8GHz Mobile, 256MB of RAM). For some months now I have noticed that the performance as way under par. I decided to back up all my documents and use the provided CDs to reformat the HD and start from scratch.

It didn't work.

The impression I have is that my processor is running at half-speed. For example, when I open a new window in Internet Explorer, the animation in the taskbar to show the new window is done in 4 or 5 frames, instead of being shown in fluid motion.

I tried to look for hardware conflicts and I didn't find any. I did everything I could to improve performance - defragmenting, registry tweaks, turning off some of the eye candy - but it's still running REALLY slow.

I don't know if this is related or not, but the other problem I have is that it fails to come back from Stand By. Instead of getting back to Windows, it will turn off. When I turn it on back again I get this message:

WARNING: RESUME FAILURE.
PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE.

It restarts when you press a key.

Any ideas on what is wrong with it? What else can I look for to see if anything's wrong?

Thanx.

 

[DaveSimmons]

It probably has motherboard shared-memory graphics instead of a real graphics card, nothing you can do about that except make sure you have the latest graphics driver for it.

Adding another 256 MB of RAM might make a huge difference, since the shared video steals 32 MB of RAM and virtual memory is much slower on a slow laptop hard drive.

 

[rbaibich]

Yeah, I know this is not the best notebook on earth, far from it. But even by its low standards, it is running TOO slow, like if there was some kind of hardware conflict.