The problem is that at times the unit will just freeze (in whatever program I'm in)for about 20-30 seconds and then resume like nothing happened.
The unit was part of a high school laptop program where any fixes were done by the school. A lot of times the fdrives were jusrt reimaged. Everything, assignments, grade, etc were kept on the school's servers, so re-imaging was their easy fix.
Also, it was set up that upon start the unit starts immediately searching for available internet connections. I think this might have something to do with the freezes. I think it is continually seraching for a connection and when it does, it freezes whatever program is in use because it opts the processing to the search instead of using the program.
I only use the unit for Excel and Word - the 2002 versions.
I've stripped nearly everything off the computer so it's not fighting for RAM or processing speed.
But if it's trying to establish a wireless connection is that using up all the RAM and processing? This old unit looks underpowered.
I've run Malwarebytes and it's clean.
I have been trying to turn off the automatic network search but trying to follow guides on the net don't work because the options listed to turn off that serach don't seem to be available on this unit.
So I'm asking two questions here, 1) what might be causing the freezing and 2) how to shut off the automatic serach for available networks.