Please help me make my Laptop faster!

[Red1263]

Hey hey Everyone! I have a HP Pavilion dv5 Notebook PC.

And ever since I graduated, my laptop after suffering from the brutal experience that is my Schooling, it never got back to it's original speed. I can't even play music and go online without hearing the music skip, or the browser freeze.

If you guys can help me with this, help me clean up and get rid of all of the useless stuff in my laptop, I'd greatly appreciate it! I'm not really knowledgeable in what's necessary and what isn't, so detailed explanations would be most helpful.

Info about my Laptop:

Windows: Vista

Processor: AMD Turin X2 Dual-Core Mobile RM-72 2.10 GHz

64-bit Operating System

Any and all help is appreciated.

[Peasant]

Have you tried de-fragmenting the hard drive?

After a year or so I do a complete fresh install, purge all the crap.

It may also be a virus, so make sure you have an anti-virus, ONLY ONE anti-virus.

I dont know how many times people complain about their slow computer and it turns out

that the morrons have 3 or 4 anti-virus.

[shagy2303]

if you trust one of us we can do remote asisitance and cleanit up

[Red1263]

Have you tried de-fragmenting the hard drive?

After a year or so I do a complete fresh install, purge all the crap.

It may also be a virus, so make sure you have an anti-virus, ONLY ONE anti-virus.

I dont know how many times people complain about their slow computer and it turns out

that the morrons have 3 or 4 anti-virus.

I only have 1 Anti-virus, and I've done de-fragments, registry cleaning, even Disk cleaning, but there's still something slowing it down.

if you trust one of us we can do remote asisitance and cleanit up

hmmm.... can you suggest anyone who can? That is, I don't know who's capable of helping me and who isn't?

[walt_mink]

To be honest, you just need to rebuild your machine. After a few years of use you'll need to just start over again to rid the system of a bunch of hooey that builds up. I will also guess that your hard disk is nearing the end of its useful life, so I would suggest the possibility of upgrading that while you're doing the rest of the work in order to bring the lifespan up.

An upgrade to Windows 7 would make sense, but it will cost you in the neighborhood of $100, so it might not be worth it. Also, Windows 8 comes out on the 26th and will run fine on that hardware and will be quite a bit cheaper for the upgrade at $69.99.

If you have a semi nerdy friend I would recommend backing up your data to an external drive, popping a new drive in, and then rebuild with 8. Once that's done you can move your data to its new home. You can do this yourself, but it's always good to have an experienced hand nearby when you do it. You'll certainly see new life from your old hardware.

[Raincloak]

ugh, you're running Vista? That might be half the problem right there. I just hung on to XP until it was time for Windows 7, but I hear Vista has a terrible reputation. Short of a total wipe and starting fresh, here's what I would do. For best results, reboot the computer after each step. You don't have to do all these things in the same sitting.

Start by backing everything important up to an external hard drive or to the cloud (online storage). That way if you accidentally wipe something you shouldn't, you have a backup copy. Documents, spreadsheets, pictures and music are the biggies. You don't need to back up any software or movies for which you still have the disks, or anything that is open source (because you can just download it again).

If your hard drive is low on space, delete memory-heavy stuff like videos and music until you've freed up some space.

(If you want to take the nuclear option, now that your data is backed up, you can try formatting the hard drive and reinstalling everything anew. Don't try this unless you know what you're doing.)

You didn't mention what browser you're using, but I recommend you get Firefox and install Adblock if you haven't already. Otherwise every time you open an Internet window, your computer gets more and more cluttered with ads. Clear the cache and cookies and etc. too, that might help.

Use task manager (ctrl alt delete) to review the list of running programs. Many of those programs are essential, but eyeball any .exe programs and note anything that's consuming a lot of processing power. Google the name of it if you're suspicious it might be a virus. Try "end task" to see what happens. Do NOT uninstall anything until you are absolutely sure it's malign, there are pranksters on the Internet who will trick you into removing crucial programs.

Open up your list of installed programs and uninstall everything that you no longer need/want. This includes things like toolbars that came with other software. If you don't know what a program does, google it before removing. Be careful not to uninstall crucial programs such as hardware drivers, but feel free to ditch any drivers for hardware you no longer own (like an old printer you got rid of).

Review the programs you use for video, music, etc. and consider whether to get more "lightweight" software (I use Floola rather than iTunes, and VLC rather than Windows Media Player, etc.)

Check all your remaining drivers and make sure they are up to date. Consider reinstalling drivers that aren't working well.

Check the startup configuration using "msconfig" and uncheck programs that don't need to start running every time you boot the computer. You can still start these programs anytime, but they won't constantly be running in the background.

If you have any software that regularly downloads updates for itself (including Windows, your virus scanner, Adobe, etc.) adjust the options in the program so it doesn't do that so often.

Finally, if that doesn't fix things, update your virus scanner, then start the computer in "safe mode." Start the virus scanner and let it do a deep scan. (Time the computer's boot to safe mode; it should be much faster than regular boot. If it's not, you have a problem.) It's possible you have a virus that is duplicating itself or evading the scanner in regular mode, but when you run safe mode, the virus program is not activated at startup, so the scanner can kill it.

[shagy2303]

im not sold on windows 8 yet . and i have fixed computers like that