Laptop tune up

[The Evil Drogba]

I've had my laptop for 2 years now and it has really slowed up, especially when trying run flash player on internet. It is also taking longer to start up.

It has 4gb ram and the hard drive is basically empty.

Any tips on how to speed it up back to its old ways? i've that over heating can be a major problem and it does get hot really quickly, any advice on keeping cool?

Cheers.

[Hutch]

If overheating is a problem, running it from the mains instead of the battery might help a little. You could also try reducing the strain on the CPU by not to have too many applications open at the same time, reduce the number of startup apps, lowering graphics resolution, things like that. And you can reduce room temperature by leaving a window open, getting a desk fan.

I'd recommend a little app called speccy, from the CCleaner people. Run this to get detailed information about your laptop, including temperature levels for CPU, motherboard, hard drive and memory. If the temperature indicators are green, then overheating isn't a problem. In which case it could be that the best "cure" for the machine is to reinstall from scratch.

[dkw]

If its overheating the first thing I would do is clean it out, remove the back and lift off the heat sink and you will more than likely find its full of sh*t.

[G-Wrath]

If it's not an overheating problem (it very likely is, though) I would recommend a format. Reinstall Windows etc. Will feel like you've got a whole new computer. You said there isn't much n the HDD so just use a flash stick or portable drive to back up anything you want to keep.

I used to work as tech support for Mac. Macs are a little different for some issues, but the best solution to a lot of problems is just a reinstall of everything.

[Peckham Blue]

Is there a way of doing a (Windows 7) re-install but keeping the programs. I've got so many I use it would be a real pain having to set them all up again?

[dkw]

Not really, what you could do is partition your HDD and create a new Windows 7 boot on it and run the programmes from that, though its not as simple as that obviously. Theres a decent little programme called "Secunia" which checks to see which of your software is obsolete or running on old updates etc thats worth having a go at. Also run CCleaner to clean up your drive and registry.

[The Evil Drogba]

cool i'll try reinsalling everything. taking the fan out and cleaning is too difficult as it is pretty locked and have to remove screen and keyboard to get to it!

Cheers!

Edited September 8, 2011 by The Evil Drogba

[dkw]

cool i'll try reinsalling everything. taking the fan out and cleaning is too difficult as it is pretty locked and have to remove screen and keyboard to get to it!

Cheers!

You shouldn`t have to do that, what type of lappy is it? Most newish ones have a heat sink attached to a fan and the whole thing should come away in one.

[Eggy McMuffin]

I make a tidy profit getting people's laptops running nice and smoothly again.

The main things to look for are programs that load on start up. Stop any you don't need, it speeds things up a lot. Uninstall if you have to. Check your antivirus, many are resource hogs. Panda cloud is excellent in that it doesn't do anything locally and thus takes next to none of your system resources. Run a good anti spyware program such as Malware Bytes, it's one of the best and is free, run it in safe mode to get the best results. A defrag doesn't do too much with the modern file systems, but is always worth a crack, just don't use the inbuilt defrag program, it's way too slow so I'd recommend Auslogics' version, I've heard good things about it. There is very rarely a need to fully wipe a computer and start again, you just have to be a little surgical, but you can definitely get things running nicely. Don't forget to check your running processes and see if there's anything you don't need. Before you try and stop a process, a google search is always useful just to check what it actually is; I've crashed many a computer being a little too trigger happy with running processes.

[dkw]

Eggy, i tried auslogics defrag and wasnt overly impressed, I now use defraggler by Piriform. I also use Ninite for new installs, a belting little piece of kit that is.