[bobskeleton]

Hi guys. I have a question about my girlfiend's laptop and I'd appreciate your wisdom!

It's an Acer Aspire 3692WLMi with an 80GB HDD. It's running at a slow-ish speed (always has though) and it appears it's running out of RAM. It says she has 0.99GM RAM, I'm not sure if that's a lot or not.

It has two hard drives of around 35GB each. One has 6% free, the other 99%. I'm not sure why that is...

I said I'd try to get the laptop running a wee bit faster so is there anything you guys can suggest that would help?

TIA

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Hi

I assume 0.99GM of ram is supposed to be 0.99GB (or 1GB). In which case, that's fine for running XP (if you're running Vista however, it could probably benefit from a ram upgrade).

I suspect part of the reason for the slowness is due to the hard drive. The drive is obviously partitioned (i.e. one physical drive split into 2 virtual halves) but will appear to be 2 physically separate drives in My Computer.
As Windows will store everything on the C drive by default unless you tell it otherwise, this explains why the second partition has 99% free space.
The fact that the C drive only has 6% free space is likely to be causing (or at least contributing to) Windows to run slowly. I first thing you need to do is free up some space on the C drive. To do this, I suggest the following:

1. Delete any downloads/documents etc that you no longer want from My Documents.
2. Empty the Internet cache
3. empty the recycle bin
4. Uninstall any programs that you no longer want
5. Open My Computer, right click on the C drive & select properties. Click on the 'disk cleanup' button on the General tab of properties.
6. Move any large files in My Documents (e.g downloads/music/video/photos etc) to the second partition.
7. Finally, defrag the C drive - programs->accessories->system tools->disk defragmenter

[Samm]

Hi

I assume 0.99GM of ram is supposed to be 0.99GB (or 1GB). In which case, that's fine for running XP (if you're running Vista however, it could probably benefit from a ram upgrade).

I suspect part of the reason for the slowness is due to the hard drive. The drive is obviously partitioned (i.e. one physical drive split into 2 virtual halves) but will appear to be 2 physically separate drives in My Computer.
As Windows will store everything on the C drive by default unless you tell it otherwise, this explains why the second partition has 99% free space.
The fact that the C drive only has 6% free space is likely to be causing (or at least contributing to) Windows to run slowly. I first thing you need to do is free up some space on the C drive. To do this, I suggest the following:

1. Delete any downloads/documents etc that you no longer want from My Documents.
2. Empty the Internet cache
3. empty the recycle bin
4. Uninstall any programs that you no longer want
5. Open My Computer, right click on the C drive & select properties. Click on the 'disk cleanup' button on the General tab of properties.
6. Move any large files in My Documents (e.g downloads/music/video/photos etc) to the second partition.
7. Finally, defrag the C drive - programs->accessories->system tools->disk defragmenter