Slow laptop. More memory?

Wearb

My neighbour has a HP 550 with a celeron cpu 550@2.00. It has 1G ram. The hard drive is 70% free.
He uses it for web browsing and skype.

He is forever calling on me to look at it because it runs too slow. I have removed as much stuff from it as I can. On the performance tab, CPU is normally about 60% and memory about 80%, though they jump all over the place too.

He asked my advice about getting a new laptop. For what he uses it for, I think what he has should be ok.

Would he see much improvement from another G of memory, or should he go for a new one?

Any advice appreciated. he is an old man living alone and not very good with computers, but gets great value from what he can do. I help him out as much as I can.

wildefalcon

Which operating system?

johndoe99

I'd be looking at task manager to see what's eating that memory up. A 1 gig increase won't do much if there's programs or processes eating the memory. Open MSCONFIG too, see if there's any services or programs that are not needed.

Tea_Bag

Ive got an an old (but prestine) HP 530 with similar enough specs. i put in an extra 1g ram for a total of 2, and threw on win8.1 (x86), and it's a hell of a lot better than Vista Basic it came with, which was horrible and slow.

Im considering Debian though, cause its still sluggish enough. An SSD would probably help a lot, but I wouldn't throw much more money into it than that. the i945 chipset is old and youre always going to be bottlenecked by the dreadful celeron M

if you do go with win8, let me know how you far with video acceleration/drivers.

Win8 installed all the drivers i need (fair play!) and even more updated than I can find on vendors websites, but I still stuggle with 720p. even HTML5 is a problem, so im not sure what to do.

Wearb

johndoe99 wrote: »

I'd be looking at task manager to see what's eating that memory up. A 1 gig increase won't do much if there's programs or processes eating the memory. Open MSCONFIG too, see if there's any services or programs that are not needed.

Thanks.
Chrome and AVG are the ones that are eating most of it. Most non windows stuff deleted in msconfig. Nothing in startup folder. I prevented auto start for Skype.

It seems to me that with windows and AV and browsers updating all the time that older computers find it hard to hack it.

johndoe99

Wearb wrote: »

Thanks.
Chrome and AVG are the ones that are eating most of it. Most non windows stuff deleted in msconfig. Nothing in startup folder. I prevented auto start for Skype.

It seems to me that with windows and AV and browsers updating all the time that older computers find it hard to hack it.

My PC here, has only 1GB RAM, AVG was the main culprit on mine last year, its a bloody resource hog, i uninstalled it and installed MSE. All's great now, my CPU does not go above 20%.

Wearb

johndoe99 wrote: »

My PC here, has only 1GB RAM, AVG was the main culprit on mine last year, its a bloody resource hog, i uninstalled it and installed MSE. All's great now, my CPU does not go above 20%.

Somebody suggested MSE to me already, but I know nothing about it. i will look it up and see what is involved in installing it.
thanks

peckerhead

+1 for MSE over AVG free... I used to use it but it became a real resource hog.