My laptop is SO slow - what can I do to clear it down a bit and make it work faster?

[SoftKittyWarmKitty]

My laptop is 5.5 years old and is really, really slow - web pages freeze, it can take well over 30 seconds to load a page, plus it makes that whirring noise like it's having to work really hard. It often comes up with a message saying the internal memory is almost full, so I uninstalled some things I hardly use but it's not made much difference. Today it's been terribly slow, to the point that I could happily chuck it out of the window.

I can't afford a new one so is there anything I can do to make it work quicker and maybe help it to last longer? However, I'm not very technical so please don't ask me to physically take it apart!

What Operating System is it? Windows? If so XP? Is it a Mac? OS X Tiger?

It might be worth getting the fan replaced maybe? Does it get hot quickly?

If you go on the control panel (or just search in help) there should be a "disk clean up" option which deletes temporary files - my computer was going a bit slowly the other day and doing that my free space jumped from 30% to 45%.

You can also "defragment" (again, do a search). What that does (sort of) is move all the free space on the hard drive so that it is together - when you delete files the computer knows it has the space, but can't always match it up with the other free space (if that makes any sense at all). If you do it then there'll be a little image on the screen which shows it working which probably is a better way of explaining it.

It's worth deleting as much as you can if the internal memory is full - with my old one I merrily ignored all the warnings and eventually my motherboard gave out - cost of replacement =£300 for parts (cheers Sony) so in the end I just got a new laptop...

is there a PC service person (shop or comes-to-you) person where you live? My old PC - with only 1GB of RAM (I think it's RAM ) - was over 4 years old & painfully slow & local shop was going to add some memory to it

Sadly it died on the operating table (motherboard issues, don't ask me what that means) but luckily we also had DS2's PC - same age - in the house because we'd got him a laptop for uni; his was 2GB & shop added 2GB more & the difference is incredible, it's 100x faster than my old one.

So see if you can do that

adding memory (if possible) is about £50 btw

It's Windows XP. I've shut it down now and have resorted to my phone as it was driving me mad, but next time I get it out (tomorrow evening, as I need to order a Christmas present), I'll try the disk clean up and defrag thing.

Think long term I need to look into getting a new one so think I'm going to have to save up, but will try these suggestions in the meantime. And get everything backed up, just in case it dies a death .

extra memory would make a big difference, temporarily, if it's a possibility

from when my old PC was new - even more so from when yours was - websites are way more complex & use a lot more memory just to open; in fact some won't open at all but I have discovered that some big clunky ones will often open ok on firefox - do you have that installed, or chrome? if not, try it

If you're going to get a new one, keep your eyes open during the sales. And wait until a new model launches, then buy the old one - there probably won't be much of a difference.

Clean up and defragment can take a while, just to warn you...

If you fit it yourself, extra memory is likely to be closer to £25 than £50.

Fitting memory on a normal laptop is not difficult.

Thanks, although I expect it would be difficult for me as I'd have absolutely no idea how to do it! I'd like a new laptop although realistically I won't have any money until around June, as I have a savings scheme at work maturing then but even so, I don't think I'll have enough for a new laptop as I have debts to pay off.

Will try and fix it best I can for now.

"It's Windows X"

Right....

1. Download and run a decent malware scanner to make sure that there isn't a dodgy process crippling things. This is pretty good www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free
2. On the desktop right click on "My Computer", on the General tab how much memory do you have? It should be under the Computer section.
3. Go into "Control Panel" and then "Add or Remove Programs". Remove anything that you don't need, if you're not sure what it is then ask.
4. Bring up Windows Explorer? Right click on C:, select properties, how much used and free space does it have. Do you have a D: that isn't a CD/DVD Rom? If so repeat the process there.

Come back with the answers to 2 and 4 and that will help determine what can be done.

Right Badgers hopefully I've done this right. I've already done 1. and 3. at the weekend, including accidentally wiping itunes when I did 3., so I need to reinstall that at some point.

1. It says 448MB RAM.
2. C: Capacity is 26.3GB. Used space is 25.7GB. Free space is 597MB. That's not good, is it? D: CApacity is 26.5MB. Used space is 89MB. Free space is 26.4GB.

Does that make sense at all?

"2. It says 448MB RAM."

That's 0.5GB, which is pretty tight for running XP. So more memory would definitely be good.

When the memory is tight what Windows wants to do is to start using the disk drive as extra memory. And I think that Windows will only use the main drive to do this, and in your case that's C:, and that's nearly full.

So one thing you need to do is to move stuff from C: to D: That will free up some space and allow Windows some disk space to use when memory starts to run low.

Moving your documents is pretty easy, but applications like iTunes can't just be dragged from one drive to another. You need to uninstall and then reinstall them in the new place.

So things like Skype or browsers like firefox. Uninstall them and then reinstall again but when it asks where to install it, the default will usually be some sub folder of C:\program files, change that to be d:\program files.

So this should take away the memory low warnings, but it won't stop the machine being slow. And, in fact, using the disk as memory is a slow thing to do anyway.

So free up some space on C:, defrag the disk and see how things then stand. I'd still like to know what's actually slowing the machine down. And I'll give some more help on that when I back on a Windows XP machine.

Badgers, the D: drive on mine is DVD RW drive

is it possible to move stuff from C: drive to that?

"Badgers, the D: drive on mine is DVD RW drive

is it possible to move stuff from C: drive to that?"

Not really.

I'm presuming that the D: on the OPs machine is another hard disk drive as it's got GB's of space free.

If you're beginning to run out of room on C: and don't have two drives in the machine then you either need to have a thorough clean up or you need to buy a new drive to plug in and use that to store things like your documents, photos and music.

ah, that helps, thanks (I am v ignorant )

buying an external drive for security is clearly a good idea in general

"buying an external drive for security is clearly a good idea in general"

Yes, but if you're using that external drive for day-to-day usage then you can't also be using it as a backup. So you need two external drives if you're running out of space on your computer. One as your main drive where you hold the stuff that won't fit onto your computer and then another as a backup for that drive and whatever else is on the computer.