Laptop slow and startup and shutdown

nikolai154

Foreversomeday: note the OP is talking about a laptop, not a PC.

To the OP: The procedure would be similar, but if you are going to open up your laptop, make sure the battery is removed!

BillScarab

Ccleaner is a useful utility for getting rid of rubbish on your PC, it can also show you all fo the programs that are running at startup. You may have things running at startup that you don't really need.

foreversomeday

Oh yes >_< silly me! Thanks nikolai for pointing that out! In that case it's probably a good idea to open it up and have a look at the RAM already in there so you can see what you need to buy. Or just ask for RAM that's compatible with your laptop, perhaps take it in to the shop when you buy it.

BillScarab

If the OP wants to upgrade the RAM, the easiest thing to do is to go https://www.crucial.com and run the system scanner. that will tell them how much they currently have, what slots they have free, what type of RAM they need to buy and what their options are regarding size and number of sticks.

You don't have to buy from Crucial but their prices are normally OK and they do free delivery as well.

TrishaM

I have upgraded memory on a desktop, but I am very apprehensive about doing it on a laptop. Have never opened one or seen inside one before.

mjr600

It's possible that Windows errors have caused your laptops hard drive to revert to the very basic and slow PIO mode. It should be running at Mode 5 or similar, PIO mode will make the laptop boot and run slowly.

START
Right click My Computer
Properties
Hardware
Device Manager
+ IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers
Right click Primary IDE Channel
Properties
Advanced Settings

Check transfer mode is DMA if available, try and alter it if it's PIO mode if you can't click the link below.

http://winhlp.com/tools/resetdma.vbs

It's a small script which will force the change, use it at your own risk, I know it works but everyones PC is different.

Nikolai

I think some toshibas have a panel on the bottom to access the memory. I don't know if your one has. If it does it is easy. If not you are probably better off getting someone to do it for you.
Have a look at the bottom, if there's a smallish panel, about fag packet size, take that off and just have a look. Laptop memory looks something like this
There are normally a couple of clips you can ease apart and the RAM comes up to a 45 deg angle and you can remove and replace it.
Post back here before you do this, several of the people on here repair laptops etc and will hopefully be able to advise you.

Chippy_Minton

TrishaM wrote: »

Please can you help? I have a Toshiba Satellite P10-722 laptop. It has always been very slow to start up and lclose down. Is there anything I can do to make it quicker? I assume that it has loads of Toshiba nonsense loading that is not necessary but don't know what to do. Have stopped some of the startup programmes but don't know if I could stop some others?. Also there are lots of programmes running in the system utility section under services can I stop any of them? It has XP zonealarm, and symantec antivirus(corporate edition).

Start with the simple things first:

1. Download CCleaner by clicking big green arrow at http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/ and run it to delete temporary files. Also click Registry and scan for and fix issues.

2. Accessories - System Tools - Disk Cleanup. Select files to delete, on More Options tab, click the Clean Up buttons to delete Windows components, Programs you no longer use (including old Java versions) and all but the most recent System Restore point, if you're happy that you won't have to go back to one of these.

3. Now run Disk Defragmenter several times.

4. Download and run Download PageDefrag to defragment system files.

5. Finally, download HijackThis Installer, install, run a scan and post the log here. From this we can tell you which services and startup programs could be disabled.

6. Run CCleaner again, as above.