I have just bought an older laptop for Megasquirt programming, however compared to my up to date laptop it's 3 times faster

Main machine is Sony Vaio 2.8ghz Celeron 512mb ram 40 gb disk.

S/hand machine is P3 500mhz 128mb ram 10gb hard disk.

It's only lightly populated with software whereas main machine is loaded.

I'm wondering if it's naturally faster as a processor or whether there's so much overhead loaded on Sony machine.

Anyone any idea?

Its just that your new machine is full of junk. Has it ever been re-formatted? And how old is it?

PC's in general tend to get rather sluggish after a couple of years, escpecially if you keep installing new software, or fiddling around with settings. Its mainly that the registry gets full of junk. Likewise if you have huge numbers of programs installed, or not much hard drive space left, they get rather slow as well.

Quickest and best solution is to do a complete reformat, then you will realise how fast it once was...

David

That sony sounds knackered!! Send it my way for a fiver!!!

also each time you install a microsoft update it slows it down a bit bec ause instead of removing old coding and replacing it with new it just bungs the new in there aswell because theyre lazy


but yeah its likely that you have enough running to "use up" your ram


as flak monkey said is it worth going through and just deleting everythign that you dont need / dont use and only reinstalling it when you actually need it etc

get something like spybot search and destroy run spyware check as that can be a big culprit in slowing machines down

just clear out the stuff you dont need incl all temp files

Thanks guys,

The Sony is 18 months old. I use SpyBot search and destroy and also RegClean every so often.

I'm convinced the Sony is slow because of Norton Security and loaded apps at startup. I've deleted some but most I need as it's used in my business.

Nice try donut

[Edited on 15/2/06 by Rob Lane]

Open Task manager and click on the Processes tab.
Check that you don't havemultiple entries or things running that are not necessary but be careful.

if you are running XP you dont need to ber carefull it wont let you delete processes thast are essential to te pc staying on without a warning box

and yeah get norton of your laptop lol norton sucks arse

Norton ---- !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Junk it and load Free AV Classic instead or pay about 20 Euros for the more versatile premium edition -- also take as much stuff as possible off he desktop You can put some of it in folders on the desktop).

If you have any OCR software loaded for a scanner or scanner/printer get rid of it. (Tip web down load versions of HP software all-in-one drivers are slimmed down don't include the buit in OCR part of the package).

Reduce the number of fonts you have loaded --- some PCs I work on have over 200 !

Nero In-Cd packet writer is notorious for slowing some PCs down.

OK I've looked in system info.

I have 120 modules loaded ? Half of which are Norton !

I have approx 40 running tasks of various signatures.

I can tell I don't want some of them running but how do I stop them?

Ipod services has 4 running tasks but I don't use it.
Adobe acrobat has 3 running tasks, I only use it once in a blue moon.

I'm sure all this overhead is slowing machine down.

As BT says. Get rid of norton and use FreeAV. Its compact and doesnt hog your system like norton does.

I bet doing that alone, will seriously speed up your laptop!!

40 running processes isnt too bad really, I have got 51 running (but i have 7 windows open (one of which is Solidworks).

If you want to stop some programs running on start-up get a little program called regcleaner and rip the programs out from there. Good thing about it, is if you kill something you later find you need, you can restore it using regcleaner as well.

David

I agree with the norton stuff its utter crap.
Personally i use AVG which is another good free anti virus program.
Also make sure for now that norton is only scanning executable files for viruses rather than all.

Their is also another good tweak you can do that usally helps and is not as extreme as having a reformat and thats defragmenting the hard drive, you can do this from the computer management thing in the control panel -> administrative tools.

I personally reformat my laptop once a year, just make sure you back up everything you need!