Hi. My father has a Compaq V5000 laptop, and runs very very slowly. Boot up takes far too long, and opening applications live Outlook Express and Internet Explorer take far too long too. The laptop has 512MB RAM and 23GB free HD space remaining. The performance gradually got slower and slower over the first 12 months after he purchased it. He has Norton Anti-virus installed and regularly scans with hard disk with Ad-aware and Spybot Search & Destroy, and sometimes even defrags the HD; but it never improves the performance. The only time we saw significant improvement was when I backup his data, reformatted his HD, and reinstalled everything again. The performance of the laptop was fine for a month or so, but quickly became just as slow again. So I'm currently trying to work out what the problem/bottleneck is. Initially I suspected the RAM because it only has 512MB, and the hard disk seems to be constantly accessing, and there presumed the HD was be used as virtual memory. However, I ran Process Explorer on it last night and the HD (I/O Bytes History) doesn't appear as if its being hammered as much as I expected it to be - several quick spikes, but nothing prolonged. But the amount of Physical Bytes History concerned me; it the graph was constantly hitting approximately 90% while web browsing. The CPU activity didn't concern me greatly either. So I'm wondering if I need to insert more RAM. I'm happy fork out £40-£45 quid to do this if it fixes the problem, but I want to be sure this is the problem beforehand. If the RAM was the issue, wouldn't it be hitting maximum (not approx 90%) if that was the problem?, ie. I'm wondering if the RAM is OK because it doesn't look like it all being used as it is... I then wondered if it had anything to do with the virtual memory settings, but I think they're OK... Custom size, initial size = 576MB, maximum size = 1152MB. And in the Total paging file size for all drives section, minimum allowed = 2MB, recommended = 573MB, currently allocated = 576MB. Any ideas what the problem might be? Thanks.
+1 norton is a piece of turd and will bring uber systems to a halt, if he complains and says but i paid for the license already, just install avg free edition or something, it works perfectly. also, for a proper defrag use perfect disk or the like. instead of spybot, try malware bytes for future reference, although the change in software will have no particular bearing on your current situtation. to streamline things a little, make sure only essential programs load when windows starts(bottom right hand corner icons). also, make sure you patch windows to the latest version, if its xp then sp3. but essentially, just do as wolf said! peace fatman
Installing more RAM should help, XP does run quite slowly on 512Mb, and means you can't have more than a couple of programs open without having to use the pagefile.
Agreed with fresh install and more ram. Get it to a min of 1Gb. Keep in mind that as the months go by, window's itself gets larger through the hotfix and patching process. On older systems it will be more evident, even more so on laptops. Other good free services to replace norton are Avira, or/and Microsoft Security Essentials. The second one is still very new, but in my experience over the last two weeks, it has been doing pretty good.
Thanks for the replies guys. I'll recommend my dad gets a 1GB RAM upgrade, and installing different AV software after reinstalling everything. BTW, I use Zonealarm AV on my desktop PC which I'm happy with, so I was thinking of recommending that to my dad, especially because its easy to use as my dad is a complete novice when it comes to computers. Is ZA likely to run OK on his laptop, or do you think it'll have the same performance problems as Norton? Alternatively I could install AVG with a firewall (either Windows FW, free ZA, or AVG AV + FW). I look into Avira and Microsoft Security Essentials - never come across those before. Thanks.
