All my writing, internet business, etc etc etc is done on a laptop.

A Samsung X20. I have upgraded the hard drive to 65.5 and all my pictures, writing etc are stored on an external hard drive of 500. (Which is still 90% unused).

On my laptop I have MS Office, Photoshop, Pagemaker and Dreamweaver.

I have removed the 'start' icons for these so that to start then I have to go to the .exe file to open them, so I only have nine icons on my screen at start up.

I use, (not at the same time) Explorer, Google Chrome and Firefox browsers.

I defrag the machine about once a month, I use Piriform CrapCleaner about twice a month, and AVG Registry cleaner about once a month.


AND I STILL HAVE THE SLOWEST MACHINE IN THE WORLD.

(The caps are to indicate extreme frustration.)

I live at the end of a long 'copper line' but pay for a laughably slow ADSL Service provided by Orange.fr, which pretty much collapses when all the kinds get home and switch on for games etc.

But my machine is dreadfully slow in the wee small hours when the lines are clear.

Links don't work, often the cursor seizes up and so on an so forth.

I do get a regular message when on the internet telling me there is a problem with Shockwave 10.

So I dis-installed it and tried to do without it, but its wide use by web-designers meant that pages would not load and locked up on me.

So I re-installed it, and the machine still is so slow.

Can anybody help?

Please.

I'm no techie either but always understood it was the amount of free memory that mostly determined speed. If you're running XP on 256Mb RAM it should be OK but if you upgraded your OS to Vista you need 2 Gig at least because the program's so big.

There. About as much use as a chocolate teacup, aren't I?

My Blog www.cavalrytales.co.uk

'The battle that never ends is the battle of belief against disbelief'

Well, maybe some people would like chocolate tea cups.

Using 'Control Panel' I have increased RAM from 4000 to 5000, and it does seem to have helped.

Of course, 4000 was quite large already and 5000 is the max possible so it says. But it has sharpened up my machine, so thanks

David

There are several ways to speed up a windows based system - too numerous to mention, actually.
Here's a couple of quickies:

Clear the Temporary Internet files.
These are files your laptop stores EVERYTIME you look at a website to help a page load quicker when you revisit.
You don't need them 99% of the time.

To Clear:

Start> Control Panel> Internet Options> delete files (cookies should probably go too.)
If an hour glass comes up you have gazillions of the things.
Wait for it to stop and your laptop should be slightly faster.

Make your recycle bin smaller.
The recycle bin always allocates at least 10% of your disk space for storage.
With an 120gig HDD this is 12gig not being used - which is dumb. Unless you are a video editor you'll never need THAT much (ignoring the fact you should always empty the bloody thing anyway).

Right-click recycle bin icon > click radio button 'use one setting for all drives' > move slider to 2 or 3 % > apply.

There are some others like clearing the Windows temp (which stores versions of your work) and stopping programmes from starting up and running in the background when you don't need them.
These need to be done carefully as messing about with processes (as you have already confessed to doing) can mess up your machine!
It's worth checking your processes (without closing them down) using control>alt>delete, recording them and googling them.
About five of them are vital the rest can be removed thru MSconfig.exe which you can also google.

The plethora of MSXP updates also burden your HDD. These need to be compressed or removed carefully.
As this is not a computer advice forum I'll stop there.
Good Luck

Pipio
... an honest insult is so much better than an insincere flattery...