Resolved Yet another slooooow computer question

My wife has an ancient laptop (a Compaq Evo N610c) which is horribly slow. Like my PC, it runs XP Home SP3 in Italian and Office 2007 in English. (We're networked, but she has Office fully installed locally, doesn't use my Office over the network.) I've done everything I can think of to keep it in good shape: cut the services to the bone, automatic AV updates every day and regular MS updates, regular CCleaner on shutdown, occasional Registry 1st Aid and Defraggler. Now that she's out of town for a few days I've brought it into my studio to run it next to mine to observe and compare behaviour. It starts up even faster than my main PC, but everything it does after that is so sloooow, including shutting down. OK, it has only 256Mb of RAM, but I doubt if I can install another stick in an old laptop, and anyway I wouldn't dare open it to check.

Today I did our monthly MS updates, and while my machine detected, dowloaded and installed 15 of them, the laptop was still struggling to detect which updates are available. I was watching the process on Task Manager, and noticed that while the graph of pagefile use on my box was more or less level, on hers it looked like the Manhattan skyline. This made me suspicious: do I need to adjust, enlarge, or even kill the pagefile? At the moment it is set to "size recommended by the system" (or whatever that is in the English version), which is 382Mb. The hard disk has 17Gb available out of 30Gb total.

OK, I could try experimenting with various settings, but - given the horribly slow speed - every test would take half an hour and I'm not sure I'd understand the results anyway. So I'd be grateful if somebody could point me in the right direction, so that at least any tests I run have some sort of relevancy to the problem, and I'm not wasting time on dead ends. (A new laptop is not currently an option, BTW.)

Thanks in advance.

 

Hi Geoffrey, try this link:http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/11382_div/11382_div.HTML
You will be able to increase the RAM x6 which should make it fly. If you've cleared Temp Files and Defragged, I think this is your next move. Cheers Neil.

 

Great minds think alike, huh? Many thanks, Steve and Neil. As for physically installing it, I guess I'll have to (1) wait for Italy to wake up after the August month-long siesta, and (2) hope the guys who sell it to me will be kind enough to talk me through how to install it.

And do I assume I don't need to play with the pagefile at all, either now or later when I've got the new RAM installed?

 

Thanks again, Steve - if you'll go with that, then I will!
Have a good August...

 

Of course! Give me time, Pete - just back from the loo!
Happy August to you too.