I’m getting so frustrated with my Laptop lately. It seems to be getting slower and slower – especially when I run my weekly antivirus scan. Man that takes forever!
I’ve been looking at new Laptops over the last month or so each time we go to a store that sells them. I thought our 60 gig harddrive was big, but it looks like most new laptops have 300 gig harddrives now! Oh and more memory too!
I certainly can’t afford a new Laptop right now. We just had the brakes fixed on the car and bought two new front tires, plus two weeks ago our brake line had to be replaced too. So with all the money we put into the car this month, plus regular bills there’s no way we can shell out more for a new Laptop no matter how much we’d love to have a second laptop in the house.
This weekend I think we might try to buy some more laptop memory. This notebook has 1 gig of memory but if we can double that I’m sure it will help the computers performance when memory hogs like the antivirus scan.
BTW my computer is completely virus free. I’ve done all the checks and as I said scan it regularly. So it’s not a virus that’s slowing it down. It’s a too full harddrive and software that hogs memory.
Hi tricia, I regularly read your blog. I like the way you share your moments of life. Cool.
If you’re planning to buy a laptop i suggest you go for ASUS Ezee PC.
They’re not only cheaper but also have good performance.
If money is not a problem then go for high-end DELL XPS Studio Laptop, extreme performance.
Why don’t you use Deep Freezer From Farconics. After installing it you’ll never run a Virus scan again. I’m using it for 2 years till now my computer haven’t crashed nor infected with any malware,spyware,virus etc.
Rds, Gaurav
My Laptop is getting to be the same way. After a while I have to reboot because the resources just slow the laptop to a crawl, I have done necessary things also to try and run faster but still not as fast I like.
If you can’t afford a new laptop right now, you’ll have to figure out how to speed up your current laptop and make it more usable. Over time it is very common for an operating system to become bogged down with many programs being installed and the hard drive filling up.
First you should analyze how many programs run on startup or in the background. It is easy to eat up a computer’s resources simply by running too many programs. Try to limit these programs as much as possible. For example, do you really need 3 or 4 different programs constantly checking for software updates?
Another way you can speed things up is to limit windows services. Read up on the various windows services and decide which ones you actually use.
Then try to clear up the harddrive a bit….uninstall old software that you don’t use and delete or backup old unused files.
Next defragment your harddrive and try to do that regularly.
If all of that doesn’t work, you may just want to clear the harddrive and install a fresh version of windows. If you do this, you might want to use XP instead of Vista as it is easier on computer resources.
If you can’t do this stuff yourself, you might be able to find a young techie willing to to do this for very cheap.
Good luck.
Agree with Jeremy. My computer tends to run all of these processes in the background that eat up memory. For example, Ipod helper or something for an Ipod that I haven’t used for years on my laptop. And all kinds of things I installed at one time are now still looking for updates, silently, invisibly running as a process, eating memory. Firefox is also terrible if you have several windows running it never cleans up its memory usage, you have to close it and re-open if it has been open for awhile. I want to try an Ubuntu Linux laptop myself but not ready yet and it would have to be supplemental to my main one.
There is certainly a downside of having a laptop.
With a desktop, this problem will be fixed instantly and cheaply.
A friend of mine have a $1800 laptop and the LCD cracked after a fall.
The cost of repair is $500, instead…he bought a non-OS $400 netbook.
Laptop is too costly to repair and fragile….I think we all need to have an expendable laptop instead. Cheap non-OS netbooks are the answer.
I’d suggest you back up your pictures/music/files and re-install the operating system. This can speed up a laptop quite a bit. Add some extra memory and purchase good anti-virus that doe snot hog your system.