Vista - Speed up possibilities or downgrade?

[MereKat]

Hi all,

I have a Toshiba laptop with Vista installed - Speccy specs are:

Operating System
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic 32-bit SP2
CPU
AMD Sempron SI-40 2.0ghz 66 °C
Griffin 65nm Technology
RAM
1.00 GB DDR2 @ 333MHz (1-3-3-3)
Motherboard
TOSHIBA Portable PC (Socket M2/S1G1) 60 °C
Graphics
LP154WX4-TLC8 (1280x800@60Hz)
ATI video (Toshiba)
Hard Drives
112GB TOSHIBA MK1252GSX ATA Device (SATA) 42 °C
Optical Drives
MAT****A DVD-RAM UJ880AS ATA Device
Audio
Realtek High Definition Audio


I know Vista is a hungry OS, and on this machine, with its low specs, it's pretty slow and quite unresponsive.

Without having to spend out on it (I believe this is now 5 years old, was left to me when my grandad died) is there anything i can do to it to speed things up? My other laptop (also a hand-me-down!) runs XP Home, which to be honest i think i prefure. The other laptop is similar specs but runs a lot quicker!

A lot of people have said 'Download so and so program to do this that and the other', but i'm not too sure on what they actually do that Windows can't do within the OS itself...

The only 'clean-up' program i have is '360Amigo', which i also have on the other laptop. That helps a bit in 'Power your PC' mode (turns off all the unnecessary bits), but it's still not great...startup is usually around 105 seconds (My other laptop is normally between 50-70 seconds)

I was going to try a factory reset on this one, but as the processor and RAM are pretty low, would it really be worth it?...

 

[KenB]

Hi

If you want to speed things up the simple steps are:

1. Make sure you have no malware - download > update and run MBAM
click here

You want the free version

If that checks out OK ...

2. Run DiskCleanUp

3. Check how much free hard drive space you have.
It should be about 15% free compared to the total drive space.

4. If all this checks out - install some more RAM.

 

[Plastic Nev]

Further to KenB's advice, looking at the spec 1GB RAM is only just enough, as you said Vista is hungry and will run much better with more, I would look to fitting at least another 1GB to bring it to 2GB, though being a 32 bit system you can't fit more than 4GB in total, so the maximum extra you could fit would be 3GB. Depends though on the slots available, being a laptop it is usually only one.
Have a look at the Crucial website and use their scanner on it, you will find out then what RAM you can fit and in what sizes.

http://www.crucial.com/

Nev.

 

[MereKat]

Cheers guys. It had 2 bits of Malware on it, both removed. HDD has 52gb used and 49gb free, so not run disk cleanup as of yet.

I belive it has 2 slots, both with 512mb iirc, so may look into a couple of matched 1 or 2gb sticks.

It was running a little better though, at least i think it was, maybe just what i has hoping for though!

 

[KenB]

Hi again

If you do have 1 GB RAM - Vista will run far better with more. At least 2GB.

If you are looking for RAM do a scan with Crucial Scanner
click here

You don't need to buy from them - you can simply use the details.