Computer Help and Support

It's pretty quick for what I do, which doesn't include gaming.

When I got it, it only had 1 GB of RAM, and I spent most of my upgrade budget on 4 GB of RAM. It was running Vista, but I installed Win7, and the only trouble was finding the right video driver for the onboard chip.

But, I make damned good and sure that very little loads up automatically when the laptop is booted. That's what slows people down after a few years, so much of what download tries to run itself constantly, and that bogs down every processor eventually.

I do genetic genealogy on this laptop, and my spreadsheet of DNA matches is about 2000 people. It takes a bit of time to load a graphic, such as a photo of a Census page, but that mostly depends on my connection speed. I use a cable modem at home which tends to run faster late at night, and I use my smartphone as a hotspot while on the road. Some areas have poor support for Sprint phones.

Run "msconfig" (without the quotation marks) in a search window, from the Start button. Select the "Startup" tab, and see how many things are set to automatically start up when you boot up the laptop. Mine only starts four things, two of them are related to the video chip software, one is for the keyboard, and the last one is my antivirus, a free version of Avast. Unselect some of the things relating to software that you only use occasionally, then reboot, and see if that makes a difference.