[James Malloch]

My laptop is about 3 year old and a bit crap, it's fairly slow and often gets upset when trying to stream Netflix etc, it has frequent pauses where the sound continues but the picture freezes etc. It has similar freezes when moving between files and programs too.

AGV (or is it AVG) often try's to make me restart the machine and it seems to install a fair few updates.

I have no idea about computers or what to do with them. Are there things you can do which might improve the performance a little? Deleting unnecessary stuff, running a general clean up thingy?

To be honest, it's probably just a crap laptop to be fair...

[lagerstarfish]

clean out the physical insides - hoover/blow out dust from any fans and cooling kit (and everywhere else)

my 'puter did similar stuff when the heat exchanger was clogged with shit

if all else fails run it on Linux 

[tomtom]

I periodically run C cleaner (seems fairly benign) to clear things up. This also allows you to see what runs automatically when you boot up - I find the auto updates from Google, Adobe, etc... Hog some performance and disable those.

Remove all the programs you don't use - their clutter can slow things down..

Get rid of AVG and get Microsoft security essentials (I assume you're running W7?) as the anti virus Sw can often slow things down. MSE is fine and works well.. Oh and it's free.

[chris j]

Depending on the laptop it might be possible to install a second memory chip or remove and replace the one that's installed (some, especially smaller laptops, have the chip soldered in place and you can't change it). This might help the pauses changing between different files as it might not have enough memory to play with.

Other things you can do include replacing the HDD with a solid state drive, this will dramatically speed up the start up time when you switch on the laptop and can speed up starting programs as well. This can be quite easy if you buy one with a lead and software to clone your existing drive onto the new one before you install it. Also, if you have all the software and drivers available to reinstall, backing up all your data, formatting the HDD and reinstalling Windows (assuming that's what you have) and then all the software and then copying your data back on can help, but is a pain.

Of these adding/replacing a memory chip will probably be cheapest, easiest and have the most visible effect.

[James Malloch]

Lagers - I'll give it a clean out soon, thanks. Hadn't crossed my mind to do that. Just need to find a little screwdriver to get inside properly!

Tomtom - I've ran CCleaner and it got rid of about 11GB of stuff, not sure if that's a lot in the grand scheme of things? I also uninstalled AVG and other programs that I don't use and stopped all the crap that used to run on startup like Skype, Spotify etc etc. When restarting the laptop I could actually use it straight away rather than having to wait 5 minutes before it composes itself! Really happy with the increased performance!

And Chris - I might look into a memory chip. I'll see how it goes following the first changes and decide if it's needed. Thanks!

So thanks a lot for the advice - it's definitely running noticeably faster already!