Slow Laptop... help?

Frankiestylee

Hi,
My laptop has gone pretty slow of late and I don't really know how to speed it back up.

It's a Toshiba portege 101
40gb with 25gb free
Pentium M 1.4ghz
752mb Ram
Windoxs XP professional.

I've defragmented the hard drive, done a full check for disk errors, scanned for viruses and gotten rid of spyware ... yet it's still horribly slow from start up.
What else can I do? I can't format the harddrive because I have some programs installed that I don't have discs for.

Any helpful suggestions will be greatfully appreciated, it's just bugging me as I've a vague idea of where I might be able to fix the problem, but I just can't put my finger on it.

iremex

depends on the software you installed, if any, recently. i'd recommend dumping the 256mb chip and replacing with at least 512mb if not the 1gb.

you mean its slow starting up or slow to run?
found that google indexing grounded my laptop to a halt a few months back.

also, norton is a beast that will eat up all your free resources.!

Tom Dunne

Frankiestylee wrote:

What else can I do? I can't format the harddrive because I have some programs installed that I don't have discs for.

Any helpful suggestions will be greatfully appreciated, it's just bugging me as I've a vague idea of where I might be able to fix the problem, but I just can't put my finger on it.

Sounds like there are loads of programs running at start up. I have a similar spec laptop with only 512Mb of RAM and it runs very well.

So, fire up msconfig and see what is loading at startup. Start->run type in msconfig and press return/enter. Post up what is on the startup tab.

Frankiestylee

Ah, I think it was the msconfig thing I was thinking of. Cheers for that.

Yeah, I know upgrading the ram is an option, but it was running grand until a month or two ago. I can't think of anything major that I installed... google indexing eh? Hmmm... I can't remember if I set that up or not, I'll go see.

Could it be Google Talk by anychance? I think that's the only recent thing I installed that might be running in the background.

Did the msconfig... on startup I have

igfxtray
hkcmd
00thotkey
000stTHK
LTSMMSG
SynTPLpr
SynTPEnh
TouchED
TosHKCW
PmProxy
avgcc
avgemc
UpdReg
Realsched
jusched
qttask
toscdspd
google toolbarNotifier
googletalk
Adobe gamma loader
Adobe Reader Speed Launch
Microsoft Office


I can already see a few lads that don't look right. Anything that might be especially dodgey and sucking the life out of my memory?

Tom Dunne

Right, lots of rubbish there.

Start by disabling the following:

PmProxy
Realsched
jusched
qttask
google toolbarNotifier
googletalk
Adobe gamma loader
Adobe Reader Speed Launch
Microsoft Office

That should speed it up.

Reboot and see how it goes. Then start on the others.

MarkR

You can actually disable pretty much everything, the only thing to be aware of is your antivirus software and firewall packages. Untick everything except those. Anything you untick can be reticked again if you require it immediately on startup (can't think what this could be, but you never know).

Just to point out for you or anyone that (maybe) didn't know you're not uninstall or removing any association with files, you're just stopping the program from starting up on boot.

Any unticked program can still be run from desktop shortcuts / start menu.

Frankiestylee

Yeah, I got rid of the google lads, the real player and quicktime one before checking back here... I'll get rid of the rest now.
Why PmProxy especially? It seems to have something to do with a soundcard or something?
Some of them are toshiba ones and others seem to be related to the touch pad, so I'll leave those boys as they are.

Bit curious about 000StTHK and LTSMMSG ... they don't seem to be in any folder and I have no idea what they do. Hrmmmmm.... ?

MarkR

Windows can take care of the touchpad, that software is probably that odd graphic in the system tray that shows you where on the touchpad you are clicking. Unless you are doing something more then pointing and clicking you could get away without it. Try without everything bar the essentials (antivirus and firewall) then see how you find it.