Vista was known for this performance. I just gifted an Acer 5570-2977 with similar specs and so I can commiserate that it's a dog. Fortunately we replaced it with a 250 buck laptop later and that laptop runs circles around that Vista laptop.
There was a few reasons to gift this to a student such as the student was a good one and their laptop was dead among we wanted to move it out of the office because engineers would waste hours trying to fix it.
It did run Linux much better than Vista so if you just need a web browser and media player, maybe it's time.
Bob
I have a Vista SP1 laptop that is unbearably slow even a web browsing and iTunes. It has 50GB free of 200GB hard drive, has a 2.8 ghz processor and 4gb of ram. One would expect it could at least run google chrome fine - and it used to.
But it has been slow for 2 years - my main laptop is a Macbook - and I have scanned it over and over, defragmented it multiple times, tried everything I could find on the internet, and still nothing. The only thing close to a solution has been restoring it back to factory settings where it works fine for 3-4 hours and then again runs at snail pace. The amount of GB free seems to make no difference, the number of processes running doesn't seem to alter performance either, and neither does how much is on at startup. I have tried those solutions a hundred times. I have used all sorts of anti-virus and cannot imagine that there is a virus on it, especially after experiencing it again after restoring it to factory settings all those times.
I am at my wits end with it and am seriously considering throwing it out the second floor window so that it at least will gain a bit of speed that way.
So please, if anyone has any idea on how I can fix it, please help me.

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