Upgrade from Vista slowed down laptop.

[Dixel]

Oh , and why some of you , keep saying he needs to upgrade to 4GB , he already did that and wrote in his fourth post here "We already upgraded the ram to 4gb so it seems to be a little better" , sorry to remind you folks, it's a done deal . But "a little better" is not a good result , don't you agree ? 

[jaclaz]

34 minutes ago, Dixel said:

Oh , and why some of you , keep saying he needs to upgrade to 4GB , he already did that and wrote in his fourth post here "We already upgraded the ram to 4gb so it seems to be a little better" , sorry to remind you folks, it's a done deal . But "a little better" is not a good result , don't you agree ? 

As a matter of fact, exception made for browsing, that with recent browser and crappy bloated internet sites means senselessly using heaps of memory, the difference between 2 GB and 4 GB (of which as said only 3.2 to 3.5 will likely be visible) won't be very relevant/noticeable, that was the point I was trying to make, and it is confirmed by the "a little better" experienced by OP.

Switching to a SSD should be "more better", i.e. more noticeable.

jaclaz

[Anonymous76]

Guys I have to thank every one of you.

I upgraded the ram to 4gb. Replaced old spinning hdd with 500gb ssd samsung 860 evo.

Reinstalled windows 7 but remained at 64bit flavor. GUYS this laptop has never been so fast like it is now. It boots up under 20 seconds. Websites are snappy (well snappy considering this cpu) and for 2-3 tabs in browser it is more than enough.

Before windows 7 I tried vista again on that ssd, but it kept bluescreening with dpc watchdog violation. Mom is happy with 7 though so it is not a problem at all.

Again HUGE thanks to everyone that helped and suggested actually good things.

[antiproton]

I glad the OP solved the slowness problem.

I came across a similar situation back in the XP era. A friend's laptop which had been working normally, slowed down to the point it became almost unusable.

The specs were 2.0 GHz Celeron, 512 MB of DDR2, shared onboard graphics, XP Home. As it was still under warranty she took it back to the computer shop only to be told they can't find anything wrong with it hardware-wise. "Slowness" wasn't covered by warranty and they had no idea how to fix it.

My friend thought the preinstalled crapware utilities may have been what caused the slowdown and she may have been right. I told her I would have a look at it.

I upgraded the RAM to 2GB thinking that should fix it. NOPE! It ran a little faster but not by much.

At the next boot up I decided to look into the BIOS to confirm the SO-DIMMS were recognized. They were. The only thing that stood out was the amount of memory allocated to the graphics chip was set to the lowest setting, 4MB. With the RAM upgrade I had done I set it to the highest setting, 32MB as I recall. I saved and exited.

When XP loaded everything was as it should have been. The laptop was no speed demon but the molasses-like slowness was gone. It looks like the low MB setting in the BIOS for the graphics chip was a performance bottleneck that slowed the entire system, but how did it get that way? The crapware utilities?

The laptop worked fine as it now was but I could not resist doing a clean install without all the crapware.