Loss Of Speed

[Gill]

My hubby's laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1501 with an AMD Turon 64X2 mobile chip 1.6 GHz with 448 MB RAM running XP with all the service packs.  Today I right-clicked on an icon on his desktop and it took four minutes for the dialogue box to appear!  I've run Glary Utilities and  but it hasn't made much difference.

Can anyone suggest how I might speed the machine up, please?

[Lance]

I would uninstall any software not used, run CCleaner to tidy up the registry and delete all temporary files. I would then defrag the hard disk.

If you're not sure how to do any of that, give us a shout

[Gill]

Thanks, Lance.  I've just seen the sticky thread here on this very subject.  Doh!

I'm reluctant to use CCleaner, having had an unpleasant experience with it before which led to me having to re-install my complete OS.

[Gary]

Thanks, Lance.  I've just seen the sticky thread here on this very subject.  Doh!

I'm reluctant to use CCleaner, having had an unpleasant experience with it before which led to me having to re-install my complete OS.

Most registry cleaners are snake oil, but CCleaner does get rid of a lot of rubbish, just dont use the registry cleaner, I never had an issue with CCleaner ever, look up how to use it, dont tick boxes you are not sure about, it will help. A good defrag program helps one that can degrag metadata as well on boot. Also check to see if any processes are hogging CPU and Ram.

[Steve]

I think adding additional memory RAM, if easy, will give an instant performance boost, even XP likes at least 1GB.

[Gary]

I think adding additional memory RAM, if easy, will give an instant performance boost, even XP likes at least 1GB.

I had to help a friend out with an ancient Packard bell with 196mb ram  odd number, and so slow it was painful, well it was painful anyway with how badly made it was, but my god this was slow, and they didn't want to pay for more memory 

[Rik]

Are you sure you mean 448MB of RAM, Gill?

[Steve]

In addition 64MB of shared graphics possibly.

I think its got 2 slots max 2Gb .

[Rik]

That would make sense, Steve. Definitely a candidate for more RAM if it's feasible.

[Steve]

Ignore the Ubuntu bit but looks a straight forward upgrade procedure

http://www.ubuntu1501.com/2007/02/upgrading-your-ram-guide.html


Cost http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/listparts.aspx?model=Inspiron%201501. you'll need a pair of either

[vitriol]

Crucial are awesome !!!!!!  I always buy from them 

[Rik]

Especially as, if you use their checker, they guarantee the memory will work with your system.

[zappaDPJ]

Four minutes to open a dialogue box suggests to me one of three possibilities.

1/ You have a virus.

2/ You have run out of RAM due to too many applications loading up at start up.

3/ You have run out RAM and disk caching space.

I honestly don't think there's an application on the planet that would sort that one out. If you can establish that you are virus free and that you've removed any unnecessary bloat-ware, I'd check that there is healthy amount of empty hard drive space available and then upgrade the RAM.

[Gill]

Thanks for the help .  It looks like I'll be placing an order with Crucial.

[quandam]

Thanks for the help .  It looks like I'll be placing an order with Crucial.

Excellent choice

[Lona]

Have you checked msconfig startup items, Gill.  You may have too many loading at startup.  Get rid of all the rubbish and it might speed things up.

[Gill]

Glary Utilities makes it very easy to check the start-up items Lona, so I'm confident the problem doesn't lie there and that the laptop is running only the bare essentials.  It's a good point, though - thanks for mentioning it.  The more I think about it, the more it seems that lack of RAM is probably the problem.