I bought a Toshiba laptop in 2005 or so. It’s running on XP and has Word, Excel and Outlook 2003. It is and has been my primary machine. It’s connected to the net via WiFi and Lynksis router.
It’s slowing down. Processing seems strained and slow.
The CD ROM drive doesn’t work anymore.
Playing Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook might cause loss of the WiFi connection.
I don’t have any installation disks.
An Avast! update with Outlook Plug-in causes Outlook to crash sometimes when receiving an email. I’m assuming it’s the plug-in causing it because the Outlook crashing wasn’t happening before I updated my Avast!.
I just bought an external hard drive (USB) and backed up my Word and Excel files just in case.
I have a newer Dell laptop that doesn’t have these problems. However, the Dell also doesn’t have some software I use all the time that I have on the Toshiba.
I’d like to extend the life of the Toshiba and speed it up before considering a switch over to a newer machine.
I don’t remember all the details off hand for XP, but if you have a lot of applications started up on your desktop you may be running out of memory in your ‘desktop heap’. Search on that term and you will get some info.
I should note this isn’t a sudden problem. I just see computer creep getting worse gradually over time.
My last computer just gradually slowed to the point that I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I got the Toshiba. I was running some program on my last machine called SpeedUpMyPC, which helped some … for a while.
Blow any dust out your vents. This can cause thermal issues and slowdown. After 5 years your registry is likely pretty cluttered up and will bog system response. A reformat re-install would be the very best thing to get maximum speed back, but you indicate you have no XP install discs.
Look at what is starting up with the system. Deactivate any “update checkers” that run at boot up.
Expanding the RAM is easy, you should be able to do this yourself. If it is worthwile is a more difficult question. You should check if you need DDR or DDR2, DDR is harder to get these days (the RAM tool probably tells you which type of RAM it is). If you intend to keep the computer for a while longer a RAM upgrade is probably a good idea, but it really depends on how cheap you can get the RAM.
You could most likely solve your problem by reinstalling Windows, as you’ll get rid of any memory-hungry crap you intentionally (or not so intentionally) installed in the meantime. Reinstalling Windows XP is not trivial if you do not have a rescue CD or a drivers CD from your manufacturer, and anyway be sure to have a good backup of your data if you attempt it.
Because Windows has expanded, and you’ve installed all sorts of stuff over the years.
Upgrading your laptop to 2 GB is almost certainly the easiest way to improve your situation. And just buy from Crucial. They’re all much the same price, but IME Crucial stand behind their product to a better extent than others.
Looks interesting but is way over my head in terms of tech savvy. There are other critical applications, like Timeslips billing software, that I can’t afford to screw up by trying to do this on my own.
While XP can address a 4 gig space, in operational terms (based strictly on my observations in adding RAM) XP is not that great at making use of RAM past 1 gig or so. Getting past 1 gig of RAM in XP is not really going to add all that much additional horsepower to a 5 year old XP system for browsing or general office suite use. In fact it’s quite possible that a 5 year notebook can’t be upgraded past 1 gig. You will get some additional kick by going from 512 to 1 gig in XP, but you have rapidly diminishing returns beyond that. Past one gig it’s typically not going to be a huge performance increase in XP.
Oddly enough I may have a sealed set of Toshiba specific OS imaging disks that will work for your machine. I ran across the set about 3 days ago for a Toshiba M45 I sold about a year ago. I’ll see if they are compatible. If so you can have them for the shipping cost if you want them