havea toshiba laptop about 5 years old, it is horrendously slow has porblems somedays starting and with programmes crashing. I have bought an external harddrive and removed the thousands of pics to that. what can i do to speed it up a little.

also can you get software to block the adds thacome up on websites as i wonder if it struggles to cope with these

any general help would be good also a decent free antivirus and spyware software would be good, althoug i downloaded defender and it scanned and said no spyware on it.

ta

You probably need to run a registry clean up to stop a few things starting. That can be risky so I'd try a few other things first:

Remove enough files to leave 10-20% HDD free. Don't have any big files on the desktop. Run a disk clean-up and de-frag, instructions on Microsoft.com.
Install Avast anti virus and do a full check
Set-up two profiles, 'admin' and 'user' and set the 'user' as limited. Use that profile for everything except proper admin tasks.

After that hit Control/Alt/Delete and see what apps are running and what is using up memory. Use google to see what the biggies are and uninstall the trash.

i donwloaded the widget from here
http://www.crucial.com/uk/?click=true
it scans your computer and tells you how much memory you can increase

i then went and bought the chips they suggest from ebay (i think), a bit cheaper

either way still a good deal – speeded up my laptop loads (similar age) and was easy to fit, youtube tutorials etc

edit though id try the disck clean-up and defrag first!

IOBIT .com Advanced system care. The free version. As NIKE says Just Do IT.