Windows Vista Trying to speed up daughters Dell E1405 inspiron

My daughter's college laptop Iwith Vista Home) has been gradually slowing down. It could probably benefit from another gig of memory (has 1 now), but because it has changed, I've been trying to clean it up first. I ran Ad-Aware which found and cleaned 7 objects. I ran Symantec AV. I took off a few unused applications and simplified the Windows graphics. I disabled some things like Google toolbar.

Now I've run HijackThis. Is anyone here experienced enough to look at its log and suggest anything obvious that that should be fixed?

Admin: Malware logs are only allowed in the Malware removal forum.

 

Terminator,

Thank you for the suggestions. Some of those I'd already completed, and didn't mention in my post, but some others have not been done yet. So I take care of that and upgrade to SP2 right away (I run XP, so I didn't know that Vista had an SP2).

I have to double check on the Norton AV, because I think that is provided by her University, and she must use it. But I could shut off its "Auto-Protect" which is the big resource hog.

Sorry about posting this in the wrong forum. I've used this site for years, but didn't know or didn't remember that rule.

Terry

 

Results of all the modifications

I'm going to provide a summary here of the changes we made to speed my daughter's Dell laptop computer with Vista. While we started out measuring things like time to load programs and data, by the end it just turned out to be her subjective observations that I think would matter to most people here.

Her Dell E1405 Insprion had a 1.73 Gig Dual Core processor and 1 gig of memory originally. It was a computer put into service in May of 2007. She used it for school and Facebook and email and downloading ITunes, but since she isn't a geek, she didn't put on applications that would really challenge the computer like gaming or video editing or anything like that.

Other than doing periodic backups, and whatever Norton Antivirus (provided by the University) did to keep things clean, in that time neither she nor myself did anything much to keep the computer running well. And by the time we got to working on it recently, its performance was pretty doggy. (Maybe it always was). I have a Dell D610 Latitude with XP Pro SP3, running at the same clock speed with 1 gig of memory, and it was dramatically faster than hers.

We did a lot of things, and I'm going to lump almost everything together here: We turned off hard disk indexing, removed ununsed programs, deleted leftover things in the registry found by HiJack This (as recommended by the friend in the thread above), ran virus scan, deleted gobs of temporary internet files, deleted other temporary files in Windows, simplified internet explorer settings per recommendations, and changed the Windows graphics and default display functions to remove all the power intensive things like transparent menus per recommendations on the internet. And, we upgraded to Vista SP2 from SP1. We probably did more than that, including most of what was recommended above. I didn't do a hard disk defrag, because it was still running on the "factory" Vista defrag automatic function, and since Vista doesn't do an analysis anymore, I just assumed it was as good as I could get it anyway.

And in the end, here is how she described all of that effort: "It may have sped it up a little, but it was really hard to be sure." Not exactly a glowing endorsement after a lot of work.

So I bit the bullet and sent out for a $45 two gig memory module, and over the phone I instucted her to pull out the two 1/2 gig cards and put that in.

Lo and behold, her comment today, with the added memory, was, "Yeh, it's a lot faster now."

I don't know how much faster, and will be looking at how well it does compared to the Latitude when she returns home at Thanksgiving. But I think the morale of the story is this: I'm sure there are a lot of ways to speed up Vista. But based on this one experience, the thing that will make the biggest change is to go from 1 gig to 2 gig memory, even after you do "all those other things. "

I understand that if I do a bios upgrade (always a little scary to me, as you are on thin ice during the changeover), this E1405 computer can make effective use of four gigs of memory. Does anyone with Vista know if there is much incremental benefit to go from 2 to 2.5 or 3 or 4 gig?

Thanks to everyone for their help. I'm going to mark this issue as resolved.

Terry

 

Thanks for the additional comments on memory, and Vista x32's limited capability to use more. I've read previously about the diminishing incremental benefit of more memory in general. That makes sense if you "get enough" for the applications and operating system you have. Based on your comments, I'll be looking forward to comparing the agility of her Vista laptop with 2 gig to my XP laptop with 1.5 gig.


Based on your experience with XP and this experience with Vista, I might have enough in her computer now. Maybe if I get energetic, I'll see what it entails to do the BIOS update and stick one of the .5 gig modules in to see if having 2.5 gig improves her Vista performance noticeably from 2.0. But it will be some time before I try that. If anyone else has actual experience going from 2 to 2.5 or 3 gig with Vista, information on that would be appreciated.

My home computer is a 2.8 Gig P4 that came with 1 gig memory originally. Eventually I put in another 1 gig to go to 2. For normal applications I didn't see much benefit, but for video editing with Pinnacle Studio, it helped a lot, which is not surprising.