[NA]General Computer Qs. [NA]

Let'sgoflying!

Let'sgoflying!

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Dave Taylor
a) The computer has 30 of available 37Gb of the hd occupied.
Will that make it run slower on start up etc.?

b) Is it possibly/easy/unlikely to add more hd capacity inside this Toshiba Satellite laptop? It has a 'Celery' sticker on it ;)
 
Dave:

That full, it is very likely that the disk is doing a lot of seeking back and forth as it loads the OS and swaps programs to/from disk.

Single best way to speed up any 'puter is lots more RAM; how much ya got? If it's 256mb, you'll see a huge difference just by bumping to 512.

You can put in a new HD, 80mb should be $120.00-ish. I am presuming this has standard 2.5" notebook drive. I'd give a llink, but I am cheating by even posting ths! More later.

PS- Headed your way T-giving weekend (Cibolo Creek Ranch); maybe fly up to MRF, coffee and howdy? /s/ Spike
 
celerons are pretty slow to begin with. I would do a defrag on your drive and see if that helps any. goto start menu | my computer | right click on the hard drive | properties | tools | defrag

It wil take some time, but will help a little.

Michael
 
Windows doesn't have issues with low disk space until less than 10% available, as a general rule. With 7Gb available on a 37Gb drive, you should be fine.

Defrag would help speed up the hard drive's performance.

Additional RAM will always help speed up performance. There is a 'power curve' here, though. Up to 512Mb, you'll see a definite increase in speed as you get bigger. Past that point and you won't see the advantages unless you run a lot of apps at once or run resource intensive stuff like graphics or games.

You can also check for unnecessary programs running in the background. How you do it depends on what version of Windows you're running. Unexplained slowdowns are almost always spyware issues nowadays. Download and run Spybot from http://www.safer-networking.org/ or Ad-aware from http://www.lavasoft.com/.
 
Instead of trying to upgrade the hard drive inside you might consider a stand alone external hard drive that connects via a USB port. Useful for storing stuff you want to keep but don't use every day and they come in handy for all sorts of stuff (transfering files, backup copies of really important stuff, copy entire contents of old computers to a single location so old computer can be disposed of, etc).

I forget exact prices I've seen in ads but they are pretty cheap.

Len
 
Len Lanetti said:
Instead of trying to upgrade the hard drive inside you might consider a stand alone external hard drive that connects via a USB port. Useful for storing stuff you want to keep but don't use every day and they come in handy for all sorts of stuff (transfering files, backup copies of really important stuff, copy entire contents of old computers to a single location so old computer can be disposed of, etc).

I forget exact prices I've seen in ads but they are pretty cheap.

Len
Click to expand...

Sam's Club or Costco, typically priced well. I've seen 'em under $100.
 
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