"PattiChati" <PattiChati@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:OVUOiZWzHHA.1208@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
>I got a used computer for Christmas as a gift that was 4 years old and it
>is gettig slower and slower. It is a Dell, windows xp pro. It has 4-MCPU,
>1.80 ghz, 512 mg of ram. What should I do to speed this up, I know more
>ram might help, but I don't want to put alot of money into a used computer,
>yet being that is was a gift, I can't get a new one quite yet. Can you
>even put more ram in a laptop. Thanks.
Slowdowns are usually due to things loading and running, or being out of
disk space (or the disk space being badly fragmented).
More RAM won't make any difference until you start to need it - then, it
will keep the system from slowing down, not speed it up. For many
purposes, 512 meg is enough.
Start with being sure that the trash is taken out, and malware is ruled out.
Download and install ccleaner (
www.ccleaner.com) - during install, choose
not to install the toolbar as at this point you're trying to minimize
loaders. You may wish to keep cookies if you have specific sites that use
them. The first time it runs, it can take a few minutes.
Then, go to
http://housecall.trendmicro.com and run the Houscall antivirus
and malware scanner. This will probably detect any cookies that you chose
to keep, and report them as spyware. Mostly, you're not concerned about
them right now.
Then, defragment the drive. Check, first, that there is enough free space
to actually do this; it wants 15% free space to run. If you had that
little space, you might well be experiencing slowdowns. Find files that
you can delete or shift to off-drive storage, and uninstall programs you
don't need.
Finally, use msconfig (start, run, msconfig) to see what's actually being
loaded, and test turn off what you don't really need.
And you may find that turning OFF Windows automatic updates prevents system
slowdowns at boot time - the update check can take a long time, up to 10
minutes or more on some systems, during which the system can be very
sluggish. If you do this, remember that you did, and check for Windows
updates manually from time to time.
HTH
-pk