Newbie Alert! Help with poss Acer5360 upgrades?

Hi All!
Took a chance & did a search for an Acer forum & saw this one recommended more than other options.
I've had my Acer 5360 for about 3 years, it was a freebie after having a major battle with Currys which went right to the top. No mods to it as yet.

Just recently it's slowed down a lot, especially on start & shut-down. But also freezes or goes incredibly slowly in use. The only work I use it for is storing & working on photographs, either in Photoshop or the Canon s'ware that came with my camera. Also obviously I'net & email.

I'm aware that this is a symptom of Vista at it's best, but am also looking at other possibilities, which hopefully is where you guys come in?

No. 1 consideration is a total installation of Windows 7, I'm not technie in any way, but one of the iIT guys at work has done it for others. As I've seen in many places, this would be a full install - NOT an upgrade. BUT if I did, do I lose the factory installed s'ware that came with it that I don't have disks for? I'm sure there were some, but can't remember what, maybe I don't need them if that's the case. Is it easy to re-install the disks I have already reg to this machine? Photoshop & Word being the most immediate.
Is this 32bit or 64?

No. 2 consideration; Upgrade the RAM to 4GB soDIMM x2

No. 3 - When I did a back up it created a DATA D drive (partition??) as well as the Acer C drive it had. I've not used it since, it's big & emprty whereas the C drive is 75% full. What's to stop me from shifting files over to there? Anything? I also back up to an external 500GB drive.

Thanks for your time, it's not given me any other grief so hopefully I won't bug you much.

 

Give us an idea of what's running in the background. You can press Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up the task manager, or right click the taskbar and bring it up. Tell us the memory usage, how many processes are currently running, and how much your processor is being used. Also, be sure you have good internet security and do a good clean virus scan to see if you have something bad going on.
When was the last time you defragged? Might want to consider doing it. Also, get a registry cleaner and clean that up if you haven't already. Be sure your harddrive is clear of any useless files and folders. Delete/uninstall programs you're not using anymore. That's just some cookie-cutter stuff to check off before we go any deeper. How much ram do you have now? What processor?
As far as the partition, I think most Acer's have a D partition, as I have one and I'm sure many others do. Acer C should have your OS information. If it doesn't, I'm a tad confused as to why it doesn't as that's the main system partition.

 

Many thanks for the reply, can't pretend to understand some of it - but here goes:-
According to the task Manager open in front of me; memory usage (Physical memory???) 79%; there are 86 processes; CPU usage, pluctuating around 56% as I do this, less before I started, around 35%. Processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 & it has 1GB DDR2 RAM.

I've since found out that the max I can do with the RAM is to go up to 2GB DDR.

I've very recently ditched Norton as I heard from too many that it was resource hungry & am currently on AVG until advised otherwise. Last defragged two weeks ago & clean out all the usual internet cookies, files etc. rubbish often thru Tools>Options.
What I meant about the C & D drives was; should I be using the D drive for storage until I back off onto my storage, rather than having the C almost full & the D all but emprty? Since I made the first post I've moved over *Gb of photographs, which I'm checking whether they've already been archived before I dump them.

The purpose of this question(s) is assessing whether multiple upgrades is worthwhile, ie. cost effective compared to a new machine.

 

BUMP! Anyone?

 

Well thanks for NOTHING.
If this is supposedly the best Acer forum I dread to think what the others are like.