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If a laptop is going slow. What is better to do? Buy more ram or buy external hard drive and put files on that so free up memory space?

hae some one look at it and figure out if you have a virus first...

the buy an external.. laptops should never have very much memeory put on them due to their smaller size and etc...

or buy more ram... wither will halp with sped, but depends on cost... dont get an external if you are gonna use it with another comp incase of virus spreading!!!

\\\\\\\"an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of the cure\\\\\\\"

get more ram, a full hard drive wont affect the speed its all the programs that run all the time that slow the computer down it uses the ram up and the cpu. the best thing to speed up your computer would be to buy a new cpu but tht means youd have to change the motherboard which would cost the same as buying a new computer and is not worth the effort. ram have their own speed (in mega hertz i.e mhz) look for ram with an equal or higher speed of your original ram. if you buy a slower ram than your original ram it will slow your original ram down. im not sure if you can completely replace the old ram with new ram. most people just put additional ram on top of their old ram. just to let you know fast is 667mhz and above, slow is 533mhz and lower. hope this helps.

edit: i read somewhere that increasing your ram will improve your performance by up to 39% which is noticable but does not make an overwhelming and dramatic difference

hi
woot woot woot woot woot woot

first thing is to find out what programs are loading at startup that you don't need and disable them. then run an adware/spyware scan and make sure you have no spyware running on your system.

for a good all-in-one scanner, i recommend avg security suite. it's available as a trial version for 30 days but you should only need it for a few if you decide you like it, you can always buy it later. just install it, run the updates and then do a full system scan. if it comes up with spyware or viruses then after it finishes scanning you should restart in safe mode and scan again.

and then after that, you can get some RAM. if you don't know what kind to get, you can find out at crucial.com. they have a tool that will scan your computer and tell you the best ram for your system. you don't have to buy from them, but they do guarantee that the ram they recommend will always work

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"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman

moondog, I checked out that site. It showed that I had 2GB RAM, where there is two slots. Each slot being 1 GB. And to get the maximum performance would be to buy 2 2 GB RAMs so a total of 4 GB. However there was hardly any difference in performance. The link below shows the difference in performance between the 2 GB and 4 GB on my laptop. Is that worth upgrading?

http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/1778/configurationar6.jpg

i didn't see whether you are running vista or xp. if you have vista, then 2GB is barely enough, and i doubt it will run fast even with 4GB of ram. if you have xp then you need to run an antispyware scan and make sure you have nothing bad on your computer.

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"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman

depending on how old the original install is.... i'd go with reformat and reinstall.. which i recommend every year or two depending on the whos using the pc.

i've done this on computers where people wanted more ram and larger harddisks. I just did a reinstall and they liked it alot better. So reinstall, then go from there.

Anti-virus... I have tried avg, but did not like it one bit. but my guy who i get support from has been using Avast on all of their vista and xp based pcs at his work. and I have run it on vista and I like it. And its free.

Fish tanks are an expensive addiction

actually, one advantage that avast has over avg is that avast can schedule a boot sector antivirus scan on your next reboot. but avg has a suite of free products that give you everything except firewall for free, you just have to download each individual component to have the full suite of tools. avast is just an antivirus. i use avast on one machine and avg on another and neither one seems better than the other as far as antivirus goes.

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"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman

running windows vista. So more ram is really worth it?

you probably won't see much improvement running vista. it might be a little better but not noticeably different. do you have a good graphics card installed? that's one way to speed things up. either that or turn off the windows effects, but if you like the look of vista then turning off the effects will give you a more "xp-like" experience.

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"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman

CPU: AMD Turion64 X2 TL-56 1.8GHz 512KB x2 L2 Cache 1600MHz FSB

Graphics Card: 128-319MB Shared Mobility Radeon X1200

Memory: 2GB DDR2 PC5300 2 Slots, 0 Open 4GB Max

Hard Drive: 250 GB Fujitsu 4200RPM (MHX2250BT)

Operating System: Vista Home Premium 32 Bit

That info helps any?

The integrated graphics are stealing RAM, and the 4200rpm hard drive is a HUGE HUGE bottleneck in that system.

You could reduce the amount of shared memory the graphics take up, or add more RAM, but you might not see a big difference right away. The drive is the glaring problem here. Laptops generally come with slower drives to conserve power, and 5400rpm is bad enough, but 4200 is downright unacceptable for a modern system nowadays. I guarantee that if you got a faster hard drive, you'd see a pretty decent difference in performance.

My two cents are for Adware, spyware, or a full internet cache. I am only going that direction, because you mention that it is slowing down, leading me to believe that it was once faster. Empty you temporary internet files, run spycop or another similar, and check you start up folder to see what is running.
Good luck,
Dan

55G -5x Bosemani, 3x Emerald Cory,3x Red Rainbow, 3x Turquoise Rainbow. 20G-Empty. 10G -4x Danio 3x Cory Fry 1 Gold Mystery Snail. 10G- 1x CAE, 2x Tetra 1x ADF

i totally forgot we were talking about a laptop in that case, yes the hard drive is going to be the biggest problem with the speed of the system. unless you can get an upgraded video card that doesn't use integrated memory, but i doubt it

also, as i said before, run some anti-spyware software like spybot or superantispyware to make sure you've got all of the bad stuff cleaned out before you decide to make some hardware purchases.

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"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman

The hard drive is definitely the problem. Upgrade to a 5400rpm drive that has decent read/write speeds. You'd be surprised how fast some of the new 5400rpm drives can read/write... some of them are even faster than 7200rpm drives.

I've got a 160gb Seagate Momentus 5400.3 (or is it .4? I don't remember) in my laptop, and the read/write speeds are ~2-3mb/s slower than a high performance 7200rpm drive, and it uses a LOT less power (and is a LOT cheaper). Anyway, the new Seagate laptop drives are great, and they're not too expensive.

Since you've got Vista, I'd recommend getting a 1 or 2gb flash drive that supports ReadyBoost. If you're good with soldering and know what you're doing, you could easily build the flash drive into the laptop (as in put it inside of the thing on an internal USB hub), otherwise you could just plug it into a USB port. ReadyBoost really speeds up frequently used programs (web browsers, IM clients, etc).

Aside from that, definitely get rid of all of your spyware/malware... maybe even to a complete reformat if you have to (you'd want to do that if you replaced the hard drive, anyway)...

Good luck!

Thanks everyone for the help. I'll try to get spybot and see if that is what might be doing. I maybe should have bought a different laptop, but it's too late now though. I got this one back in the first week of September. I'm still making monthly payments on it.

Try Disk Clean Up and Defrag before you do anything. Also, cleaning out your history, etc can help...





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Just one more tank........

i got 2.5 gig of ram now(from 512mb). the computer has hugely (its a word) improved on speed. the only thing that needs to be fixed is the internet its broadband but was a cheap one and my parents dont want to upgrade it because the provider has forgotten to bill us for over three years..........

hi
woot woot woot woot woot woot

i just heard about a tool called vlite which is supposed to take a lot of the bloat out of vista. once you finish your spyware scan, give it a try. it's supposed to make vista run faster. i haven't had a chance to try it since i don't run vista, but the ones who made this tool also made one for xp that a lot of people recommend.

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"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman