Laptops General - Read Only

[agrippina]

Hi,

I'd be grateful for any help or advice. My Inspiron 1300 laptop has suddenly slowed down to a crawl. I've run the Disk Cleanup and compressed / removed all the files and programmes I can; I've reduced the programmes which load up on startup to a minimum and I've defragmented the hard drive.

Nothing seems to improve the performance. Although it will boot up, it takes 5-10 minutes, and then loading a programme or accessing the internet can take another 5 minutes. I've tried System Restore but when the computer restarted I got a message saying it was 'unable' to restore to the point I chose. This happened several times with different restore points.

When the machine starts, it does display a message about the device in the system modular bay not being correctly installed - but we have had that for a while without any problems, and can ESC past it.

If there's anything else I can try before giving up, I'd be grateful for suggestions.

thanks very much in advance

[a18d02fe49bd48d]

have you tried running any anti-spyware? like thoroughly scan the whole system? here are something you might want to try.

www.ewido.net/en/download

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/mirrors/index.html

run this ONLY in safe mode:

http://tinyurl.com/l6220 - smithfraudfix

http://tinyurl.com/95tZv - smithrem

if all that's done and then you still have the same issue, then you need to do a pc restore. restore the system to factory default, the computer when you first got it by pressing CTRL + F11 and restore the system. It will remove all the files including viruses or spywares or adwares.

:)

[agrippina]

Thank you very much for this. We have anti-virus protection so I hadn't tried spyware scanning but I'll definitely give that a go. Thanks also for the system restore advice - that's really helpful and much appreciated!

[a18d02fe49bd48d]

No probs. :)

[SlamX]

You probably infected with something. Get all of these. Turn off System Restore. Boot to Safemode and run them all.

Spybot Search and Destroy

Spywareblaster

AVG Free Edition

CCleaner

Adaware

[yelmottob]

I appreciate that it is a long time ago, but did you ever resolve the slow Inspiron 1300 problem? Perhaps you gave up in frustration, and consigned it to the Recycle Bin!!  My wife's 1300 has always been slow, but I had not realised how slow until recently.  I have decided to see if I can fix it, I am a retired electronics engineer, experienced more in telecommunications than computer technology, but have enough background to be able to trouble shoot etc.

First question would be - if I want to bring the RAM up to 2Gb, do I have to add another 1Gb, or must I change the existing card to one housing 2GB?

I have decided not to examine the 'static' machine but take a look at its 'dynamic' situation, i.e. why is it so slow whilst processing - what is it doing?  Using the Task Manager, I notice that CPU usage regularly reaches the 'strangling' levels of 100%.  I have another DELL pc the 1545, so I am able to do a side by side comparison, and the 1545 rarely exceeds 90% of CPU usage. The 2 processors are respectively 1.4GHz and 2GHz, but the 1545 is running 50 times faster than the 1300!! Respectively the RAM content is 1.24GB and 2.00GB. My knowledge runs out at what 'PF usage' (RAM?) is, but the 1300 regularly runs at over 1GB, as does the 1545, but if it is RAM, the latter has another 1GB in hand.

Finally looking under the 'Applications' tab of the Task Manager, the 1300 has an AOL Scheduler running continuously, which I have ended, noticing a small improvement in performance, the 1545 has no such Application running.  Further when accessing Applications e.g. Internet Explorer and all others, the applicaions page regularly gives 'not reponding' messages, before eventually opening the application.  The 1545 does not pass through this slow intermediate stage.  Again what is the 1300 up to at this time? Both are connected to broadband over the same home wireless hub.

All ideas welcome,

Regards,

Bob Bottomley