Why is wife's computer slow...

The specs on her Netbook.. it has always seemed to be slow.. what can i do to speed it up.. it takes like 30-60 seconds for internet pages to load where my laptop takes like 5-10 seconds.

 

More memory or a SSD will do the trick.

How old is it? a clean install of the OS might help if it's more than a few years old.

 

Malwarebytes

Scan couldn't hurt.

 

What OS is installed? If Vista, than that's the reason. If Windows 7, you probable should have more than 1GB RAM. Then again your processor speed is only 1.66GHz, that's pretty slow too....

 

It runs XP.. its a year old.. she only uses it to surf internet and Facebook..

 

1.66GHZ is a small processor. & 1GB is the bare minimum on memory nowadays. Netbooks are only for email & light duty. More memory if you can upgrade memory in your netbook. 3GB or better & it will be a huge improvement. Today's web is a memory hog. For facebook & websites she should use Google Chrome. It loads pages much faster than Exploder(Explorer).

 

she only uses it for email, facebook (No games or anything, just status updates, pictures..)and google

i can understand slow loading pics.. but google search feels like a dial up connection on this thing

 

yeah it just has low end hardware in it is all. Im not computer savy enough to give you advice on what to upgrade to speed it up a bit.

 

well in that case you can bump it up to 4 gigs of ram pretty cheaply (as long as netbooks use the same ram as desktops, I am computer retarded so Im probably wrong).

 

Try doing a system restore..... You go to start, all programs, Accessories, System Tools, System restore.... try to restore it from the earliest date it can... That might help... and before doing that you can go to http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ and do a virus scan for any malware or trojans slowing down your computer... Make sure when she opens her emails she DOES NOT open any links or click any links on spam.... Spam would be like HEY YOUR A WINNER CLAIM YOUR PRIZE NOW.... or something of that sort..... Your welcome.

 

More RAM and you will def see an improvement, but you will be limited by your processor speed, HD speed, and Video card, so I would say spend the money on a few more GB of RAM and leave it at that. should also clean up the OS. Find out how many programs are running behind the sceen and get rid of the ones you don't need to run the OS. Clear out all the unnecessary programs that start up when Windows starts. This should help out a ton too.

 

It's a netbook and they aren't meant to be fast. Like you said your wife mainly uses it to go online and check her email, which those thing are only really meant for. I believe you can up the 1gb of ram to 2gb max, but that's not really going to do much. Just tell her only keep one window open at a time and try not to multitask with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS4u1EjwQgw

 

Get her a tablet. Or suffer through the slow pages.
Like others said, the netbook has low end components. The reason, to keep cost low.

If it were me, I would buy a tablet (not ipad, unless money is no object) & sell the netbook on ebay. There are plenty of tablets on the market in different price ranges. A co-worker bought a 10" Toshiba Thrive & paid $350 & it has
16GB of memory. He said it works very well & no slowness.

 

ah, bummer.

 

1) test your internet speed (speakeasy.net, ..etc) to make sure that's not the problem.. sometimes a bad ethernet cable or coax connection can affect it..

2) have your tried more than one web browser.. sometimes a browser will crash, ..and w/out you knowing it deposit a shitload of temp files in a directory (i've had problems w/ both opera and firefox doing this...) it will bring the browser to a crawl... you have to delete all those temp files

3) clear all browser cache

4) put more RAM in that thing!

 

An Intel Atom and 1gb ram... dont expect much from that combo regardless of the type of storage used. Dare I ask what OS is installed?