windows is sluggish

[foges]

A friend of mine's laptop is running kinda sluggish and im not sure what the reason is. I have run an av scan (AVG) and spybot, plus ive disabled some startup apps (strun) and checked if there were any programs i could uninstall. The only reason i could come up with is that it has to be the ram (its got 512 megs, CPU is a 1.5 GHz Pentium M). It is however more sluggish than my parents' desktop (512MB, Athlon 1700+). Any other suggestions?

Right now im thinking about getting more ram for the computer. CPU-z reports that the ram is PC2700, meaning that this ram should be compatiable right? http://www.toppreise.ch/prod_49113.html

he alsso reports that sometimes whilst working the screen will go black and he needs to move the screen to get it working again. this is a purely hardware problem right?

Thanks

 

[MrChad]

Is he running XP? More RAM should help performance somewhat, depending on how many applications he's running simultaneously. Laptop hard drives are generally slower than their desktop counterparts because many run at lower RPMs (4200 or 5400 vs. 7200+) to conserve battery power.

I would use the memory advisor at http://www.crucial.com to determine what type of memory to purchase.

 

[foges]

Yeah hes running XP, i know ram will improve performance somewhat, but right now im just hesitant to recomend that he buys more ram to find out that it really doesnt help much.

I had forgotten about the harddrive factor, how would i determine the harddrive speed?

Ill check out that website thanx
EDIT: Just did and found out the ram slots dont support more than 512 megs each, hmm. I cant find that ram here though (switzerland), i can only find corsair, but i think that should work (its prety much the same specs)