I recently bought myself a new Asus laptop, it is brand new and has a buttload of ram but I’ve noticed it will freeze/slow-down every now and then for 5-15 seconds at a time. I am running Windows 7 (a free upgrade from the place i bought it) and using Firefox.
It originally came with Windows XP but i installed the free upgrade CD the day i opened hte laptop so im not sure if WIndows 7 is the problem or not.
I only mention using Firefox as I have heard that Chrome is sooo much faster, but I wasn’t sure if it could fix a problem like this.
Is there a chance I messed up my Windows 7 installation? Or could it just be a shitty browser?
I have not used Windows 7 so I am only guessing this still works:
In Vista you would click on START then type MSCONFIG in the Start Search box.
Select the STARTUP tab and in there start unchecking stuff that looks superfluous. If you are unclear what something is Google it. If you still have no idea leave it alone.
Reboot the PC.
Note this does not delete anything from your PC. It merely stops things from running at startup. Some of those things may be important though so if something seems amiss just do the above again and check the appropriate box so it starts next time you reboot the PC.
The reason for this is PC manufacturers often install a ton of crap you do not want or need. I am guessing something is running in the background that is slowing your PC.
You could also do a CTRL+ALT+DEL and start the TASK MANAGER. Select the PROCESSES tab and sort on the CPU column so the highest CPU usage is at the top. See if you notice something gobbling resources.
Lastly, update all your drivers where possible to the latest, Windows 7 drivers (and 64-bit if you have a 64-bit version). Good idea no matter what and despite being a new PC the drivers could easily be months out of date.
My new Acer does this. It’s something screwy going on with the wireless card, as sometimes the connection fails, but despite having reinstalled the drivers, it still happens every now and again. Probably a hardware problem.
Check the power settings.
Make sure the hard drive power down is set to a longer period.
Default is 20mins I think and it takes about 5-10 seconds for the drive to powerup and read things on the drive.
I had the problem with my desktop and after changing that, it runs well.
I did find that it reset back to 20mins once but I may have done that by mistake.
How old of a laptop are we talking? If it was originally an xp machine we could be talking a unit that is at least 2.5-3 years old and may not have hardware and or drivers that are fully vista/win7/64bit compliant. All the ram in the world won’t help if it’s a low-midrange single core CPU more appropriate to xp environments.
Is the hard drive light running steadily during these laggy phases? If so you may have a slow/low cache hard drive, laptops are famous for this.
What antivirus are you running and does it make a difference if you disable/uninstall it temporarily?
Download Crap Cleaner (now known as CCleaner) and run it, and see how many pieces of software are trying to run in the background on your machine. Then turn off the ones you don’t want or need. (Warning – CCleaner itself now tries to sneak in the Yahoo toolbar crapware when it is installing (how ironic!) – be sure to uncheck that box when you do the install.)