Slow Laptop; Windows XP Home Edition?

Question

Okay, so I have a question about my laptop. It's a Dell- Inspiron 1100, Windows XP Home Edition. I just updated from the Service Pack 2- to Service Pack 3. But it didn't do anything, really.

See, it runs extremely slow. Especially when we switch it on, it takes a very long time for all the icons to appear in the navigator bar.

Even when we click on IE, or FF- it takes about 12 seconds for them to load up, and programs also freeze constantly on it, since its so slow.

It isn't a virus or anything, we scan everyday with AVG.

I've got 260, 436 KB physical memory available.

551 MB memory for paging file size for all drives.

It'd be great if you could help me out.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Run CCleanr to start with: http://www.ccleaner.com/

And turn of daily scanning in AVG....if you want to scan on virusses, do it by hand, not scheduled.

Also use AVG 7.5 instead of AVG8...the last one slows down your system.

Answer 2

Hi Brandi, the memory you have, 256MB is very much on the low side of what XP is comfortable working with, especially as more programs get added (and more things load up on startup).

With memory being so cheap now, i would highly recommend a memory upgrade to 1GB which will be a big improvement and should also be very cheap too. To get some idea have a look at www.crucial.com or www.crucial.com/uk if you are in the UK and click Scan My System, it will install a little program but it is safe it's just so it can let you know what memory is compatible with your laptop. Even if you don't wish to buy from there at least it will help you know what memory you need and give you some idea of price.

You may also want to remove any programs you no longer use if you have any and check the following - Start > Programs > Startup as these are some of the programs starting up when Windows starts. You can just right click and delete, this doesn't remove the program, just stops it from starting automatically. This will help a little too.

Another little tip is to defragment your hard drive by going to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter. As time goes on, information and programs end up all in bits all over the hard drive wherever there is free space. This tool will arrange everything back neatly again in order and make it quicker for your laptop to access them.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Check http://www.pc-optimizer-pro.com

With pc optimizer pro you can safely clean, repair and optimize your computer.

It will help improve your system performance without expensive hardware upgrades.

Answer 4

Using a registry cleaner can clean up your computer and then make your computer faster,Why?the reason is that there may be some registry errors and remnant,corrupt files and temp files in your computer to cause "computer slow".

Every time you install and uninstall software on your computer and surfing online you create junk in the computer registry.over time, the registry can grow to enormous proportions, especially if the various programs you've installed do not do a good job of deleting and/or updating it's Registry entries.You need to scan and clean your computer with registry cleaner to make it fast.Good Registry Cleaner will improve your computer and Internet performance dramatically!

There are some comparison and review of TOP 5 registry cleaners.

http://www.fix-system.com/

You can download and scan your computer for free.