The Official Computer Tech Support Thread

[Freebase Dali]

Originally Posted by AwwSugar

My Dell Laptop is slow, the internet runs slowly and loads slowly, sometimes it randomly freezes on me.

It's two years new, but it was hardly used before a few months ago. It was still in the case when my uncle gave it to me.

The virus scan runs clear.

The computer is about 52% full, space wise.

I don't have a lot of programs running at the same time.

I notice that when my roommate is on her Mac, everything is extremely quick, and we're on the same internet network. I'm not sure if it's the different computers we have, or what. I know I'm not giving enough information, and if there's something else I can give you, I'm sure I could.

Anything?

Try running defrag on your drives, and search around for a free registry cleaner online and run that. Also get a spyware removal tool like Adaware and run that. You can also disable a lot of background services that run by default, using up available RAM, that you don't actually need. Depending on your operating system, there are guides available on the internet that can walk you through which services you can safely disable.
Also, increasing your page-file, which uses storage on your hard-drive as temporary virtual memory, can also take the load off your RAM demand. There are plenty walk-throughs for that available on the web.
Doing all of the above, you should notice a performance increase if any - or a combination of the factors addressed above - are contributing to the performance problems you're experiencing.


How much RAM does your computer have?
And what speed processor?
If you're comparing your computer's speed against another, it may generally just be a matter of your computer not having as much RAM and processing power as the one you're comparing to. Try to use the basis of your performance decrease as a comparison to how fast your computer was when you first got it, compared to how fast it is now. If there's a general downslope of performance as time passes, then chances are you just need to do some cleaning up. But either way, your computer won't become faster than it's capable of being, as it's limited by the hardware components unique to your configuration.