Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler IT guys - Laptop needs a tune-up

I’m using my g-friend’s laptop to control my CD changers. The Music software taps it out and I am finding that it runs out of memory. I can’t have but the music software running either. I can’t run any other applications at the same time or it’ll lock up. Her friends bought her this thing about two years ago so she could email back and forth while she was studying abroad. In other words, it was pretty cheap. We need more memory and speed, and I being the type of fella that likes to do everything myself……am contemplating doing this. How hard could it be?

It’s an Averatec laptop. It has an AMD Mobile Athlon XP-M 1600+ processor…….256 MB DDR…….and a 40 gig Udma 100 hard drive.

What do I do first? It this thing even up-gradable?

For Starters, adding memory is always a good thing. Keep in mind, the OS takes up about half of your available memory. Also, have you ever done any clean up on the hard drive with "Disk Cleanup" and "Disk Defrag"? Virtual memory runs off of the hard drive, so if your hard drive needs clean up, that may help also...

For speed, you're out of luck. You can't upgrade the processor on most laptops since they are soldered to the board -- unlike desktops which have convenient sockets.

As far as RAM goes, 256mb is barely enough (as you've surmised), but is easy to upgrade. I'd definitely recommend doing it yourself.

Is the laoptop model number 3150P? You can upgrade your laptop to 512 mb. Here's a link to the proper chip.

So how do I tell if I can upgrade the processor? What is the one I have anyway? Compared to Pentium?

The model is 3150 HS. Had to find it on the bottom of the machine.

Yes, I did the defrag and clean up already. Went through and wiped out all the bundled software I don’t need. Didn’t go into the start up though……….I don’t know how to do that, but have seen my IT buddies do it before.

Thanks for the memory link, I’ll order that unless there’s something better that you think I should get.

I reckon that I should mention that I AM NOT a computer tweaker. I hate the damn things to be real blunt. All that waiting around for it to do what it’s spose to do kills me.

Your main problem right now is memeory so I would go that route first. My girlfriend is still holding on to her 1000mhz Celeron mobile laptop. It was painfully slow as it only had 128mb memory until I upraged it to 384mb. Now it handles music and everything except a few video files fine.

If you get your memory maxed out it should solve your performance problems, I can't imagine CD changer software taking a lot of CPU power to reqire a processor upgrade. Also while upgrading RAM on laptops is fairly simple, things get a lot more complex when you want to get to the CPU.

That CPU should actually be fine for most things. RAM as mentioned is huge for laptops because the hard drives that come in laptops are no where near as fast as their desktop brothers. When you don't have a lot of RAM the operating system needs to create 'virtual' memory by using the hard drive thus a HUGE slow down.

So really your upgrade options would be hard drive and RAM. And I don't know if I'd bother buying a new hard drive for that particular laptop, esp when you will find maxing out its RAM to be cheaper and more productive.

Any tricks with the ram upgrade?

Actually, most laptops do have a socket for upgrading the CPU, but it it is tough to open the laptop to upgrade it, and it isn't going to be worth it if you pay someone to do it.

I would recommend reformatting the system. That is probably why it is locking up. Often times people think their computer is getting "slow" then want to upgrade their computer when actually their operating system is getting all crapped up. After a year or two, or three, it's about time to reformat windows. It's just kinda the way it is. Things get messed up, drivers get conflicted, programs get added, removed, stuff like that.

If it's running windows xp, you are definately going to want 512 of ram in there. 256 mb is torture.

What you can try doing is defragging the system and running this neat app called CCleaner. That clears up a sistem well.

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After a year or two, or three, it's about time to reformat windows. It's just kinda the way it is.

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Ummm... that's like taking a sledgehammer to a problem that can be fixed with a screwdriver. Although I suppose for the average user, it would be easier to reinstall than to do a good cleaning. Then again, there's all the files that might accidentally get lost during a reformat, and applications you lost the install media for, etc. etc.

mdrew... check pmbuko's post up above for the RAM (viewing the forums flat... wish they'd just kill off that threaded view ;-)

I do think reinstalling windows IS a good idea, if you feel comfortable doing that. Back in the Win9x days that would absolutely be a requirement, these days with XP its not so bad but if a lot of programs got installed on the laptop it definitely would help some by doing that. You really still need to get that RAM upgrade, I suggest do that first and if it doesn't seem to help as much as you hope then perhaps look into formating and reinstalling.

Also, some antivirus programs can really put a strain on a computer, esp again if you don't have a lot of RAM. Usually its not so bad if your CPU is over the 1Ghz mark (which yours is... I think the Athlon 1600 is around 1.3 to 1.4Ghz IIRC).