Every Friday evening my Laptop slows to a crawl. Why? Well, that’s when my Norton Anti-virus runs it’s weekly system scan. I usually only have my Firefox browser and email program open while the virus scan is running but it’s still slow as molasses.
I think that I seriously have to look into getting more notebook memory, maybe that will help. The computer has 1 gig of memory, so maybe another gig would help? I’m also sure that if I didn’t have a nearly full hard-drive that would help make the scans faster and keep my computer running at a decent speed too.
Maybe I’ll spend some time this weekend deleting programs that I’m not using and getting rid of old files. I have a lot of zipped documents that I could probably dump.
Hmmm I wonder how you add more memory to a notebook? We used to upgrade our desktop computer- practically making new ones with new motherboards etc … but I’ve never tried upgrading a laptop before. Any tips?
Firstly Norton is taking up LOTS of memory so if it’s slow only when it’s scanning I don’t think you need more memory.
Also you should try some registry cleaning tools before buying more memory.
I’ve recently upgraded from 1 to 3gb of memory and the difference was barely noticable.
My laptop always runs slowly when AVG does it’s scheduled scan! I’m updating my laptop in the next couple of months!
If your laptop takes a long time to boot up, you may want to conduct an audit of your startup programs. To do this, place your cursor over the icons in the taskbar at the bottom right of the screen. If you rarely use any of these programs, right-click and disable them. To take more control over what programs load when you boot up, download System Suite 7 Professional ($59.95), which includes, among 60 powerful tools, a startup manager and optimizer.
Thanks for the reply. Actually my laptop is loading fast now. A month or so ago I changed Antivirus programs (my Internet provider was changing to it’s own inhouse antivirus program (which worked slower than the Norton Antivirus that they had provided free for last two years or so), and I ended up switching to a free antivirus program – Avast – and tada … my laptop boots up fast and the programs run faster. So it was Norton Antivirus slowing things down all along.
Use avast antivirus.
I’ve tried it.
As a result it is very fast scanning.
Loading was also not to be slow.
Hi,
At the moment I have a Macbook Pro and its pretty fast and I don’t have any problems with it.
If you decide to get a new laptop I would get a Mac because before I had a Mac I had an Acer laptop with windows vista on it and it started to go slow like yours. I used this software called Turbo Your PC and It worked better than I thought.
As for installing memory into your laptop, its fairly straight forward, most DDR2/DDR3 RAM just clip in. It was quite easy to install in my Mac anyway.