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General discussion

Year old notebook running sluggish

by dmanrevived Nov 21, 2005 5:30AM PST

I have an Acer Aspire 2000 series notebook that I got last March. Check the CNET reviews and you'll see that it got an editor's choice and everything. After over a year of use, the notebook definitely runs a LOT slower than before, loading takes much longer than before. I know this is probably because I've installed programs over the year. Now I've uninstalled pretty much everything except for essentials such as office, firefox, avast, zonealarm, ad-aware and chat programs. I've upgraded the notebook's 512 ram to 1gig a few months ago, that made a little difference. I've also run ccleaner to try and clean up the system a bit so it might run faster. After all that, windows boot up still takes about 5-10 minutes, usually loading a lot after logging into windows and waiting for programs to load. I checked the startup list of programs, and there're only about 10 or so which are essentials. Anything else I can do to give my notebook a bit of juice? I noticed my HD is 4200rpm, would an upgrade to 7200 or even 10000 be a noticeable upgrade? Any other ideas to make my notebook few younger would help.

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8 Posts
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My 4200 to 5400 RPM resulted in ...
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Nov 21, 2005 5:46AM PST

A boot time reduction from over 4 minutes to under 2 on my Acer ter-600. The drive was a slug.

Bob

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The upgrading process
by dmanrevived Nov 21, 2005 7:19AM PST

I have done small hardware upgrades before, but I've never upgraded a hard drive on notebook nor on desktop. So I'm a bit clueless to what to do aside from switching the hard drives. I plan to have an external USB 2.0 enclosure for my old hard drive for back up/transfer of data purposes.

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I used a desktop and Ghost.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Nov 21, 2005 7:29AM PST

A spare desktop with 2.5 to 3.5 drive adapters plus Nortons Ghost to clone the drive was what I used. The payoff was beyond what I could have imagined.

Under 99 bucks for the drive, less than that for Ghost and the 2 drive adapters.

Bob

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hmm
by dmanrevived Nov 21, 2005 7:45AM PST

I won't have access to another computer in the future. Is it possible to have the new hard drive in the external closure and copy my old drive over entirely (possibly without Ghost)? And there's nothing else I need to do (maybe something complicated in the BIOS) after the drive is copied and simply inserted into the notebook? Last question: Are there many types of notebook hard drive types? I keeps seeing different interfaces such as ATA-6, ATA/100, and many variations of those with different numbers or with the word "ultra" thrown in there. Thanks for the help, much appreciated!

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The future seems that bleak?
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Nov 21, 2005 8:10AM PST

That's bad. Did they ship you off to a place without PCs?

As to ATA, you are now, in my opinion overanalysing. But that's your choice. I went simple and obtained a new drive, copied my old drive over so I could:

a. Measure the before and after effects.
b. Save my time.

If the places that sell said drives or the drive maker's web sites don't answer your new questions I'd consider not doing business with them.

As to without Ghost, my new tool of choice is Acronis. It might copy it out to the USB hosted drive. Worth the money.

Bob

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Making things too complicated indeed.
by dmanrevived Nov 21, 2005 8:31AM PST

I'm not entirely sure how simple or complicated it is to get a new hard drive for my notebook. I just want to make sure the new hard drive I get is indeed compatible with my notebook. So it's as simple as getting a new hard drive, having my old drive copied to my new drive, and just switching the old one out and stick in the new one?

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For me, it's always that simple.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Nov 21, 2005 9:09AM PST

But I do this every month at the office it seems. I have my method (Ghost, adapters) so I just repeat the process.

If the laptop owner starts overanalysing, I ask them to do more research and come back when they are ready to execute the changeover.

Bob

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try this first
by 0wnz Nov 21, 2005 11:16AM PST

There may be something on your system slowing you down that you are missing. If you can, back up your needed data and format drive, then start over with a fresh install. I have done this to various computers that were acting subpar over the years and it almost always works. Hope this helped.

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