My stepdaughter has a one-year-old Toshiba laptop running Windows Vista and the thing is painfully slow.
I did a little research before posting this. Her computer sat for several months with a discharged battery. I bought a new charger, got the thing running, loaded the 52 upgrades. I did what I could to reduce the processes in the tray so that the system is not being asked to do any more than reasonable, menial tasks.
Granted, it only has 512 meg RAM, but this is the minimum requirement. It's the "Basic User" version of Vista, the machine was bought a couple of years ago and I was a little surprised it didn't have one gig. But I'm sure that Toshiba didn't intend for the machine to be this slow.
Let's say Internet Explorer version 8 is running, and you click on anything else, it just sits there for several minutes before displaying a hollow screen, which takes more minutes to fill in. It says this is a dual core Pentium running at a little under 2 MHz. I ran the "System Resources", or something, utility that's available from the task monitor (something new, not in XP) which shows the system RAM to be around 80% utilized. It seems like it's thrashing, but why?
I am new with Vista, but comparing this system to my wife's five or six-year-old Compaq, running XP with a similar clock speed, the same amount of RAM, and a single core processor, she can run circles around her daughter. Is this typical? I feel like the answer's going to be a resounding, "put some memory in the thing", and I will if this will solve the problem. I can't help wondering how XP would run on this same box... but that ain't gonna happen.
Any suggestions will be appreciated.
Thanks,_P.