Old Laptop - add memory to make faster?

[androbbob]

We have a 4 or possibly 5 year old laptop - its a Toshiba Equium M70 173 and as 512Mb of memory. Is it worth spending say £25 to get some new memory and is it easy to install? I am okay at having a go but there is alos a PC shop round the corner, so wanted to know if it is a waste to ask him to do something that I could jsut as easily do?!! Will it make it work faster? It used to be a good pc but seems to have slowed down in the past year (old age probably!). It is used for web, Word and a drawing package called AutoCAD (which uses a lot of memory) but not all at the same time! If I am on the web I may have Excel open to do my banking stuff, or I am just browsing the web - it takes ages to upload pages.

Any advice or should I just junk it? Can't afford a brand new one and this one is not bad just slow!

Watching as I've the same problem.

Yes, upgrade the memory. It will make a noticeable difference. Crucial Memory is showing that a 2GB memory kit for that laptop will cost about £30 plus postage.

Laptop memory upgrades are usually pretty easy. There will be a little hatch underneath probably with a screw holding it on. The Toshiba website will probably have more information.

TonyThePrawn do you think an external zip drive would work, or is that just for backing up / saving ?

External hard disks increase the amount of stuff you can save but don't make the computer any faster.

Ah ha! Now I understand. Thank you.

While I think adding memory is a good idea, I also think using something like ccleaner to clean your system and checking and removing unnecessary programs and startup items will speed your machine up.

Ideally, I'd reformat the hard drive, having backed up all data, reinstall Windows and only the programs that you actually use but only if you know what you are doing.

Memory will help, but I'm not so sure that it will make the big difference that you're hoping for. That you say that the computer has slowed down a lot in the last year suggests that other things are at play.

Ccleaner does a few things, one of those is to clean up the registry, the benefits of doing this are very slim indeed.

However what it can also do is to control what loads when the computer starts up. Yes there are other ways of doing this in Windows but it's a bit complicated, Ccleaner makes it pretty easy. Stopping unwanted stuff loading is the thing that will make a big difference to the performance of a PC and for that reason alone Ccleaner is worth a free download from www.piriform.com/

I'd also download and run the free version of Malware Bytes (www.malwarebytes.org/) to check if there are any nasty things running on your PC that you want rid of.

Once you've done all that then I'd consider a memory upgrade but not before.