Laptop is slooooowwwww

[Howie]

My computer knowledge is quite limited, but my computer was running slow, often showing 100%.  The problem was something was wrong with explorer and it was continually attempting to download windows updates.  I downloaded explorer again and all was and is fine.  Just something to check.

[Slide Panda]

Listen to the Derby man, you need more memory. I'm sure there's room for streamlining what you've got running - kill off things running in the background etc.. but 512mb is pretty low, doubly so if you're running vista. Memory is cheap, and the speed gains will be great if you jump to 2 gigs or more

[mitt]

Yeh, 512 is about the bare minimum needed to run XP SP3, let alone Vista.

mitt

[corey]

http://www.apple.com

[Gator]

http://www.apple.com

+1 

[Speeddog]

An Apple isn't going to happen. 

This lappy came straight out of the box with Vista, but being the cheapest thing I could find at the time, I'm not surprised it's low on hardware spec.

[Slide Panda]

An Apple isn't going to happen. 

This lappy came straight out of the box with Vista, but being the cheapest thing I could find at the time, I'm not surprised it's low on hardware spec.

Well it was probably spec'd out for XP but got a drive with Vista in the end. Like the 05 620s - we'll call ti a transitional model year.  Either way, you're best off getting some more memory and doing some house cleaning.

[JEFF_H]

there's a good program to look up what memory your lappy takes at crucial.com

[mitt]

there's a good program to look up what memory your lappy takes at crucial.com

Good customer service too    My laptop memory was on back order, and would take an extra week to get, so they knocked a couple bucks off.


mitt

[ZLTFUL]

Get me a model number for your laptop and I can just about 100% guarantee you  have 2gbs laying around for it i will send to you.

Vista "prefetches" the most common stuff you use and stores it in the RAM so that it doesn't take so long to load. Kind of like when you are cooking something, it takes alot less time if you have all the ingredients sitting on the counter instead of spread out all throughout the cupboards.

And the hatred for Vista is mostly a hold over from those who had bad experiences (or have no experiences at all but listened to friends who had issues) at the outset. Vista, with a few tweaks has been a pretty dang good OS and suffered growing pains very similr to those XP had when it was released.

[JEFF_H]

can you forward me info on those vista tweaks?

My lenovo laptop freezes apps and crashes something EVERY day.
and runs slower than the XP machine that was 3 years older that it replaced.
(example- as i was writing this went into personalize desktop to see if there were eye candy items i could turn off to speed things up. crashed explorer  )


memory info- Crucial/Micron warehouse is just down the road from me 

[mitt]

Vista "prefetches" the most common stuff you use and stores it in the RAM so that it doesn't take so long to load. Kind of like when you are cooking something, it takes alot less time if you have all the ingredients sitting on the counter instead of spread out all throughout the cupboards.

Xp prefetches also - right?

I am receiving 7pro next week - just not sure I want to install it yet on my puter, since we use Autocad 2006 at home...

mitt

[ZLTFUL]

XP's prefetcher was primative to say the least using the pagefile for it's prefetch instead of the RAM itself.

And probably the 9 best things you can do to speed up a Vista computer:

http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/supertweaks.htm