Forums Forums Enthusiast Forums A - Z Gadgets & Tech Laptop Running Very Slowly - more RAM the answer?

I am running Vista on the following laptop...

HP G60-213EM (click for specs)

The laptop is running very slow even when only one application open (i.e. web browser). The HDD light is lit for long periods which suggests to me that the HDD is being accessed a lot, but not sure what for.

I realise that Vista is pants and when funds will allow, Windows 7 will be getting installed. However, I don't think I have enough RAM. Currently have 1Gb installed. As you will see from the spec the max available is 4Gb, so this will be my first upgrade.

Could the HDD be slowing things down too? Didn't used to be a problem - but everything is slow now.

Any hints or ideas appreciated.

Vista is paging to the HD. It's basically not got enough ram and is using the HD as virtual ram ( hence the HD going nuts )

Upgrade your ram , minimum of 2 gig but preferably 4gb.

more ram is always better, but check out task manager to see what's going on. Look at i/o reads and writes (you'll need to add these columns in from view/select columns) sort them in order.

you'll usually find your virus scanner is at the top. There are numerous ways to optimise performance:

1) change virus scanner to only scan writes (and not read/writes)
2) Remove any unwanted programs at startup that consume resource (i.e. torrents, limewire, auto updaters, msde/sql server etc)
3) Defrag your drive
4) configure page files - try vista manager

This may help ?

Clicky