MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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As per the title. My old Dell Inspiron 6400 is slowly grinding to a halt. I mainly use it for surfing and iTunes(with external HD). I plan to replace it eventually but the battery is still in good nick so binning it seems a waste. It just takes an age to boot up, occasionally hangs when several IE pages are open and doesn't work at all when the antivirus software is updating.
It currently has 2 x 512mb of RAM. Will upgrading this to 2 x 1GB give it a new lease of life?
Also, can anyone recommend any sites to buy memory from? Mr Memory seems reasonable @ £27 for 2 x 1GB. Is this good or not?
Thanks in advance.
I'ver always used Crucial for memory in the past, and never had any concerns - not sure how prices would compare but worth checking.
format the harddrive and reinstall of the OS?
It will help but you may benefit from giving it a good clean out too.
Even maybe a fresh install.
Memory will not really do much if all you use it for is the basics. Swapping the HD for a faster spinning HD would help things more than memory IMHO.
....but as others have said. A bit of software maintenance works wonders. See what is starting up and running when you boot up the laptop that you do not need.
ive had this scenario too, on my old desktop pc.
i upgraded from 256mb to 1gb.
it was transformed, like a different computer.
i bought the memory 2nd hand off fleabay, it was fine.
as above though, try defragging it first.
Ditch the spinning platter hdd and go solid state.
And get more memory.
Solid state on an old laptop, hardly cost effective and for little gain if any HD space.
Crucial for memory upgrades (if only to find out what you can fit).
If it's "slowly grinding to a halt" though, that's a software issue. Check for viruses and malware, scandisk and defrag, uninstall what you're not using, etc. Maybe a rebuld?
Crucial and Kingston usually do the trick. Often best to avoid the cheaper ones IMO.
Mr memory took my gf's machine from 512 to 2gb. Is on windows xp, and it genuinely is like a different machine. Only gets used for the basics, but made a huge difference. It's worth running anti-malware and virus before though to check there's no nasties in there slowing things down. Depending how confident you are, it's worth using task manager to see what's running in the background, googling the processes and seeing if you can turn any off.
Forget about SSD drives.
If non of the above makes much difference, more memory and then possibly reinstalling the os is prob the way forward
i used the crucial software to tell me what i needed and then bought it cheaper off ebay
added 1.25 gb and really speeded up my laptop
Definitely go for a fresh install. However may be worth checking how many processes your machine is running, fire up task manager and check. A mate recently complained of a slow laptop and he had over 60 processes running at startup, all resource hungry mainly useless. I managed to get it down to 30 odd. I use winpatrol to stop these programs and services automatically running on startup. I'm sure there must be loads of other programs which do the same thing.
Just this minute purchased some cheap memory from ebuyer.com. 1 gig for £12
2Gb will almost certainly be better than 1 Gb ( depending on what you do with the laptop ) but...
computers don't get slower with age. If you are finding yours is responding more slowly now than when you first bought it then you need to do the following:
1. Get good anti-virus/anti-spyware software and ensure that your computer is clean.
2. get a disk defragmenter. Use it.
3. Download Ccleaner, find out what is being automatically started at boot time ( you will be surprised ). Using your judgement, disable individual programs one by one and see if performance improves.
If the above fails then re-install Windows ( which really is just an extreme version of point 3. )
Cheers everyone, memory ordered.
The computer is fully defragged and virus protected. Unfortunately I've lost the disc so reinstalling everything isn't an option (just checked though, 73 processes running 😯 - I think I'll have to look into winpatrol too - thanks Bimbler).
Ditch the Windows and go for some low-resource Linux. My Dell Latitude D600 runs Ubuntu 10.10 and she's pretty good with 3/4GB RAM. With a lighter version she'd fly.
Cranberry - thanks, will try number 3.
Yes and i buy mine from ebay......
I found a SSD had more imapct on the speed on my netbook than increasing the RAM, but I only bought it as I wrecked the old drive.
One easy way to sped up XP is to delete the contents of the prefetch folder. don't worry it repopulates itself.
To sort out your slow boot install soluto (google it). It's a non techie program which identifies everything that starts during the boot, tells you how long each item took to load and gives you options and recommendations on whether to remove them from start up, delay them or leave them. Will make a massive difference to your boot time and its free.
One easy way to sped up XP is to delete the contents of the prefetch folder. don't worry it repopulates itself.
My laptop is running Vista, does this still apply?
..coming back to read this tomorrow
Dont bother, duntmater! There will be just more of the same half-baked toss being spouted. A 'little' knowledge is a dangerous thing.
OP could be sorted for £25.00 at a good lcs.
Vista is hungry in terms of resources IIRC. XP was nicer, almost anything was. I haven't tried the 7 but it's meant to be great. I'll still say Linux but it isn't for everybody.
www.download.com might be of help