Laptop help?

[DETOURS]

My lap top is crapping out I think, any advise or suggestions?

It's an Acer....its about 7 years old now........
It's got an ungodly ammount of hours of use.....
It's been thrown.....
It's been froozen.....
It's been baked in vehicals......
It's subjected to shop dust dailey.....
It's battery is good for 7 minutes.......

It's been a pretty damned good pcs of crap for years now, I'd buy another!

But.....
Now-a-days......it needs to be defragged several times a day to have any speed.......
It's the only way it seems to respond.......cleaning & defragging....

Am I overlooking something?
Should I start digging a hole?

Any help/assistance/suggestions/knowledge of things to come, would be great!

Thanks in advance!!! ;)

[4.3LXJ]

I would get the shovel ready. Just a suggestion. Something I am looking into for the wife is a Motorola Atrix phone. You can get a keyboard dock for it which functions like a laptop, or you can just slip the phone into your pocket. Battery is supposedly good for 6 hours.

[cantab27]

nerds be along soon to help ..............im with steve, get the shovel..........

[Mudderoy]

My lap top is crapping out I think, any advise or suggestions?

It's an Acer....its about 7 years old now........
It's got an ungodly ammount of hours of use.....
It's been thrown.....
It's been froozen.....
It's been baked in vehicals......
It's subjected to shop dust dailey.....
It's battery is good for 7 minutes.......

It's been a pretty damned good pcs of crap for years now, I'd buy another!

But.....
Now-a-days......it needs to be defragged several times a day to have any speed.......
It's the only way it seems to respond.......cleaning & defragging....

Am I overlooking something?
Should I start digging a hole?

Any help/assistance/suggestions/knowledge of things to come, would be great!

Thanks in advance!!! ;)

How much memory? What size is the hard drive? How much free space left on the hard drive? What operating system are you running?

A hard drive will not get fragmented enough in one day to justify defragging. If this is making a noticeable difference it could that you just think it is helping. Your hard drive should have 20% free space. The defrag will complain if you don't have at least 15% free.

The other thing that could be a problem is having too many things running causing lots of memory to be used. This would require swapping of running programs to constantly be swapped to and from disk. Memory = fast Disk = slow. Run fewer programs at the same time. You may be able to increase the amount of memory that you have in your laptop. Windows XP works better with 1GB of memory, I'd prefer 2GB at least.

One thing you can do that will really speed things up is to reload the operating system.

Another and this will make you think you have new modern laptop, replace that hard drive with a SSD drive. They are pricey, but instead of a mechanical hard drive the SSD is memory acting like a hard drive. Much faster!

[msmoorenburg]

Get the shovel ready. Your 4 years past the usually replacement time but hey that's my 2 cents

[DETOURS]

Okay....whats the best method of gaining memory from your existing memory space within the system? Just go through it & dump things like photos & unused items?

The defragging makes a massive improvement in performance, it begs for it.

I do run 4-5 windows at a time....1 being Jango, constant music source.

It's windows xp....

A phone is not an option, when it pukes, I'll get another Acer.......it's lasted longer than my 1st marriage and catching up to my second....(is that possible?....lol...)

Tell me more......tell me more!!

[DETOURS]

Get the shovel ready. Your 4 years past the usually replacement time but hey that's my 2 cents

It will need to last till spring then.......it was -1* here yesterday morning with the wind chill......the ground as frooze!!!;)

[DETOURS]

Okay, so today I've done nothing but 2 windows at a time at the most, performance has been pretty good....Only ran cleaner once.

Does this tell you anything Mudd? :sign0181:

[4.3LXJ]

I think you could use some more RAM in it for that.

[bluedragon436]

Do you have an OS disc or restore disc that came with the laptop?? Or even a recovery portion of the HD?? If so I would honestly recommend re-installing a fresh copy of the OS... especially as XP likes to clog up on crap over time.. I usually do mine about once a year or so..

[Joliet Johnny]

Do you have an OS disc or restore disc that came with the laptop?? Or even a recovery portion of the HD?? If so I would honestly recommend re-installing a fresh copy of the OS... especially as XP likes to clog up on crap over time.. I usually do mine about once a year or so..

I agree. I would reinstall and upgrade the ram. With your computer being that old anyways I hope you have everything backed up to an external hard drive or cds cause it sucks to loose that much stuff. I do alot of things like this for side money from home so if you need a disk just pm me.

[oderdene]

try GlaryUtilities, it is free and auto check registry errors, temp files etc and clean. I run it weekly.

[Joliet Johnny]

try GlaryUtilities, it is free and auto check registry errors, temp files etc and clean. I run it weekly.

I use CCleaner for that. Does it work better?

[DETOURS]

I use CC as well.
I'll look for the disc, I think I know where it is after 7 years and a 800 mile move....:pray:

Meanwhile, I'm going to see what I can dump......:nuke:

[KH96XJ]

+1 for, after you backup any files you want to save, formatting and re-installing the OS with a memory upgrade if it can support more than what is currently installed.

I try and do this once every two years if I keep my pc that long before I build another one.

[Joliet Johnny]

Guess this is abit on topic. I backup important pictures/documents by emailing them to myself.

[bluedragon436]

I would say at least backup needed files, and then reinstall OS if not upgrade the memory at the same time....

[xjsnake]

Putting all my music, photos, movies and documents on an external HD and reinstaling the OS rejuvinated my laptop quite well. I was considering a new laptop but now over a year later, my laptop is still running fairly well.

[denverd1]

I think you've gotten your moneys worth. Backup and grab the shovel. You can get 10x the comp for half the price.

Sent from my Desire HD using Tapatalk

[Mudderoy]

I think you've gotten your moneys worth. Backup and grab the shovel. You can get 10x the comp for half the price.

Sent from my Desire HD using Tapatalk

I think it really depends on the type of computing you do. If you are using a laptop for browsing the Internet, e-mail, and social media, well there isn't much reason to have 2x the computer.

Reloading Windows will fix most speed problems.

You must MUST have anti-virus/malware software running on ANY computer connected to the Internet. I recommend MS Security Essentials, or AVG from Grisoft.

Adding memory, and/or a solid state disk drive will make a huge difference in perceived speed. More so for the SSD than memory. If you are running WinXP and you have 512MB memory, you should notice a difference going to 1GB, depending on the price I would consider 2GB. If you already have 1GB then I would focus on the SSD.

Another thing that might help improve the speed of your laptop is find out what speed you are connecting to the Internet. You may be too far from your WiFi device. The little icon in your taskbar usually will tell you the connection speed if you move the mouse pointer over it and just wait a sec.

Again all these are perceived speed. What the overall impression of how fast your computer is. This has little to do with true processing speed these days. CPUs are SOOO fast they have outpaced the other technologies, like memory and hard drive, so the CPU does a LOT of waiting for these to catch up during processing.

[msmoorenburg]

I think it really depends on the type of computing you do. If you are using a laptop for browsing the Internet, e-mail, and social media, well there isn't much reason to have 2x the computer.

Reloading Windows will fix most speed problems.

You must MUST have anti-virus/malware software running on ANY computer connected to the Internet. I recommend MS Security Essentials, or AVG from Grisoft.

Adding memory, and/or a solid state disk drive will make a huge difference in perceived speed. More so for the SSD than memory. If you are running WinXP and you have 512MB memory, you should notice a difference going to 1GB, depending on the price I would consider 2GB. If you already have 1GB then I would focus on the SSD.

Another thing that might help improve the speed of your laptop is find out what speed you are connecting to the Internet. You may be too far from your WiFi device. The little icon in your taskbar usually will tell you the connection speed if you move the mouse pointer over it and just wait a sec.

Again all these are perceived speed. What the overall impression of how fast your computer is. This has little to do with true processing speed these days. CPUs are SOOO fast they have outpaced the other technologies, like memory and hard drive, so the CPU does a LOT of waiting for these to catch up during processing.



Words from a true performance tested :camera:

[4.3LXJ]

I have some old computers. I don't use them any more because of hard drive problems. Stuff just keeps getting bigger. I have a 4 year old lap top that had a good sized hard drive in it when I bought it. But after loading a piece of software on it that took up 90 megs it got small. I still use it, but I am going to dump that software. There is more and more imaging involved, internet file size is getting bigger and so forth. Now for my current computer I have two one terabyte hard drives in it so I won't have to worry about that for awhile. But even so, as expandable as this one is, there will come a day when the operating system is antiquated, four terabytes of harddrive and 32 gigs of memory won't be enough and I cannot buy software for it and no support for it.

[Mudderoy]

I have some old computers. I don't use them any more because of hard drive problems. Stuff just keeps getting bigger. I have a 4 year old lap top that had a good sized hard drive in it when I bought it. But after loading a piece of software on it that took up 90 megs it got small. I still use it, but I am going to dump that software. There is more and more imaging involved, internet file size is getting bigger and so forth. Now for my current computer I have two one terabyte hard drives in it so I won't have to worry about that for awhile. But even so, as expandable as this one is, there will come a day when the operating system is antiquated, four terabytes of harddrive and 32 gigs of memory won't be enough and I cannot buy software for it and no support for it.

Yeah like a garage hard drives are easy to fill up. You don't NEED the majority of what you have in there, but you WANT it. If anyone goes the SSD route, 64GB most likely, I would get a simple, cheap, SATA USB drive enclosure and put that old mechanical hard drive in it. Now you still have access to the crap, without slowing down the computer. :D

[denverd1]

I think it really depends on the type of computing you do. If you are using a laptop for browsing the Internet, e-mail, and social media, well there isn't much reason to have 2x the computer.

Reloading Windows will fix most speed problems.

You must MUST have anti-virus/malware software running on ANY computer connected to the Internet. I recommend MS Security Essentials, or AVG from Grisoft.

Adding memory, and/or a solid state disk drive will make a huge difference in perceived speed. More so for the SSD than memory. If you are running WinXP and you have 512MB memory, you should notice a difference going to 1GB, depending on the price I would consider 2GB. If you already have 1GB then I would focus on the SSD.

Another thing that might help improve the speed of your laptop is find out what speed you are connecting to the Internet. You may be too far from your WiFi device. The little icon in your taskbar usually will tell you the connection speed if you move the mouse pointer over it and just wait a sec.

Again all these are perceived speed. What the overall impression of how fast your computer is. This has little to do with true processing speed these days. CPUs are SOOO fast they have outpaced the other technologies, like memory and hard drive, so the CPU does a LOT of waiting for these to catch up during processing.

Totally depends on your application. For most folks, add in hi-res pictures and video plus a few hours (or days in my case) music and anyone can fill a 100 G drive pretty quickly.