Old laptop speed problem.

[SlugForAButt]

My mate has had a Toshiba Satellite Pro L10 (Celeron 1.2 & 256MB) for the last 5 years and is finding it unbearably slow.
It is damn slow, with a click taking anything up to a minute to register.
It's running XP SP3 and had Norton and loads of other crap on there. I've uninstalled Norton and disabled most other rubbish through Msconfig but it's not much better.
I've kept and eye on the CPU load and temp and nothing is out of the ordinary, although XP keeps increasing the page file size and the HD light is going most of the time.

Cheers.
Is there a more cut and dried case of needing more RAM or could it possibly be something else? I've ordered him another 512MB but I'm going to look like a pratt if it's something else I haven't thought of.

 

[beermonster]

Could well be the hard drive, see if you can give it a test with drive fitness test, download a copy of ultimate boot cd or the like.

 

[SlugForAButt]

I'll try that, cheers.
BTW, it boots and runs in safe mode as sharp as you like which is what made me think it's software bloat.

 

[beermonster]

Yeah could that also, only way to try is a reinstall.

My mate brought a dell round the other day and it had xp on 1 gb ram single core 1.8ghz celeron, it should have flown in xp, took about 5 minutes to get to the desktop, tested the hd and it showd controller fail, imaged it to a new drive and it was like a new laptop.

 

[SlugForAButt]

Put the new RAM in and the job's a good 'un. Running at a normal speed now.
I'm assuming that the OS was having to run off to the page file for every little thing it did which was slowing it so badly?
Anyway, thanks for the help Beermonster, one for the memory banks for the future.

Cheers.

 

[beermonster]

256 its just about bearable on a fresh install of xp but it soon gets clogged up. Its the same with budget vista systems that ship with 1Gb ram, fine till you actually start wanting to do anything other than browse the net.

Glad you sorted it.