Hey, I'm a college student using a Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop. I guess I should start with my system specs:

OS: Windows Vista Home Premium
Intel Core Duo CPU T7300 @ 2.00GHz
2 GB RAM
128 MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS

Windows Experience Index: 3.4
Processor: 4.9
RAM: 5.9
Graphics: 3.4
Gaming graphics: 4.2
Primary hard disk: 5.2

I am seeking help in regards to my painfully slow laptop. Every program I run will start as a non-responsive program, and after anywhere from 10 to 2 minutes (any Microsoft Office or CS3 program takes long) then the program will finally become responsive, only to perform slow afterwards. Office applications are constantly being forced to restart, my touchpad occasionally becomes non-responsive, among many other problems.

The slow speed isn't limited to opening and running programs. Opening the start menu, switching or opening tabs in Firefox, closing windows.... It's all so slow! Frankly, I'm getting awfully frustrated.

I've already considered the possibilities of my laptop being infected, but I have already run Spybot Search and Destroy, Ad-Aware, McAfee, and RegCure. I've done multiple scans with each program, and after each round of scans, my laptop still performs unforgivingly slow. Many of my peers also run Vista, and even those with a lower Windows Experience Index have their laptops perform flawlessly.

I also thought that my laptop couldn't handle the Aero visual effects so I tried running Vista under classic view, but nevertheless my laptop was still unbearably slow. I have ran the defragmenter (although I hear Vista defragments automatically) and have even tried removing some of my startup programs.

I'm going to try to chat with a Dell technician tomorrow morning, but would be very appreciative if someone could help me here (since Dell has already disappointed me with this laptop.)

Thank you all for your time and consideration in advance. I should also mention that I am not very computer savvy, so if you could kind of dumb your explanations down, I'd appreciate it

Sounds like a conflict software/driver related.

Any new software installed?

Do you remember after what this started to happen, or was this nb like this since you got it?

Check out if your software is compatible in this list.

Google


Hope it helps...



Mav

Check for excessive use of resources in the Processes tab of Task Manager. To check hard disk usage, go to View...Select Columns and check the box for IO Reads. Check the CPU, Memory, and IO Reads columns for excessive usage and let us know what you find.