Please help me speed up my daughters laptop?

pastmybest

I am staying with my daughter for a while and he has asked me to take a look at her laptop and see if I can speed it up as it is very slow. It is a four year old Dell Inspriron 6400 with 512 mb of RAM.

So far I have:

1) Taken off the Comodo anti virus suite and replaced with AVG as that one action alone has made it much faster.

2) Taken off 5 different spyware applications.

3) Removed dozens and dozens of desk top short cuts.

4) Run CCleaner.

5) Run Malware.

I am wondering whether 11 gbs of My Documents stuff is slowing things down.

There is 512 of ram but have another 512 of ram on its way from a friend to make it 1 gb but wonder if that will make a difference.

I have thinned the programmes down as there were many different ones for each of a number of applications such as photo software.

Any ideas what else I could do that may help but I would not wish to try a reformat as I am not that good. But if it is felt that is the only way I guess I could get a PC repair shop somewhere to do it. But other ideas would be worth trying first may be.

aliEnRIK

1 Gig ram should make quite a difference

How much available space is there on the harddrive and what size harddrive is it?

When you say malware do you mean malwarebytes? If so please open malwarebytes, goto LOGS and post the WHOLE of the last log

reboot
Download HIJACK THIS (Make sure you click 'DOWNLOAD LATEST VERSION')
http://www.filehippo.com/download_hijackthis/
Click MAIN MENU then DO A SYSTEM SCAN AND SAVE A LOGFILE(Takes seconds) then post the log so we can see whats running
(do NOT do anything else with Hijack but scan and post the FULL log)

Lokolo

When the laptop is running, how much memory is being used?

Press Crtl + Shift + Esc, a box will appear, go into Performance Tab and there is a bar graph type thing, which says something like PF Usage, how full is the bar? (or how much does it says underneath)

jacobsdaduk

pastmybest wrote: »

I am staying with my daughter for a while and he has asked me to take a look at her laptop and see if I can speed it up as it is very slow. It is a four year old Dell Inspriron 6400 with 512 mb of RAM.

So far I have:

1) Taken off the Comodo anti virus suite and replaced with AVG as that one action alone has made it much faster.

2) Taken off 5 different spyware applications.

3) Removed dozens and dozens of desk top short cuts.

4) Run CCleaner.

5) Run Malware.

I am wondering whether 11 gbs of My Documents stuff is slowing things down.

There is 512 of ram but have another 512 of ram on its way from a friend to make it 1 gb but wonder if that will make a difference.

I have thinned the programmes down as there were many different ones for each of a number of applications such as photo software.

Any ideas what else I could do that may help but I would not wish to try a reformat as I am not that good. But if it is felt that is the only way I guess I could get a PC repair shop somewhere to do it. But other ideas would be worth trying first may be.

What operating system it is running?

closed

Files, shortcuts, data has no impact on speed, it's what is running and how much ram you have to run it in. (the processor/disk speed obviously matters, but that doesn't change)

http://www.malwarebytes.org/startuplite.php

avast is lighter/better than avg

The Dell should have a factory restore partition (see manual or dell website), which makes restoring to the speedy state it was when it left the factory a breeze, press a key at bootup, and 10 minutes later it's done - but you need to backup all your data first to an external hard disk or DVD's, because it will wipe the lot.

jacobsdaduk

closed wrote: »

Files, shortcuts, data has no impact on speed, it's what is running, how much ram you have, how fast the processor/disk is.

........malware..........

hermanmunster_3

I had similar problem but with 256 mb - put further 1gb in and computer is heaps better

artbaron

Check your disk. If it's on the way out then this is a major cause of slow-down. Don't use Microsoft s/w, it's rubbish, try something like HD Sentinel - http://www.hdsentinel.com/download_hard_disk_sentinel.php

closed

jacobsdaduk wrote: »

........malware..........

malware runs....

jacobsdaduk

closed wrote: »

malware runs....

Don't take it for granted that the OP knows that.

closed

The point is data/programs/shortcuts sat there doing nothing don't slow pc's down, deleting them or defragging makes no difference to speed.