brand new laptop, very slow?!?!

I got an acer aspire 4820 for Christmas, with a quad core i3-380M cpu, 2gb ddr3 and a 250gb hdd, but it freezes sometimes and lags a lot any suggestions???

 

Western Digital HDD?

BTW Core i3 is dual core.

 

no, hitachi hdd
on taskmgr i set it to one graph per core? i have 4 graphs?
also, my cpu is rarely above 75% usage, but my ram is constatly >60%??
pls see the attached pic

 

Core i3 380M uses HyperThreading so you can see 4 cores but in reality it's a 2 core CPU. If you had Core i7 that has 4 physical cores you'd see 8 virtual ones.

There are several things wrong with the screenshot- one 87 processes running. Surely there are things you don't need there.

Second- you have only 2GB RAM (which your should upgrade to at least 4GB) but it's showing 1.5GB usable- 512MB is probably reserved for GPU usage.

So first of all try to keep the list of things running down- see what auto-starts and what do you really need.

Second- you really need to upgrade RAM- at least 4GB is needed and all you have is 1.5GB

 

WOW!

Thats a lot of resources being used! What have you installed onto it?

Norton or something along those lines.

2gb is not a lot if some of it is used for the GPU.

 

i am going to upgrade the ram, probably to 8GB as its quite cheap ~£40, and the only programs i have installed are microsoft security essentials, firefox and vuze.
at the time that the screenshot was taken i had firefox open only, and it was lagging while trying to go on facebook and stuff D:

 

I can see the amount of Processes being run is at 87.
It's not uncommon if you have lots of tabs open in your Internet Browser, but without it, Windows 7 should have roughly 45 to 48 processes with MSE installed (or about 40 less).

I suggest you go to Control Panel -> Programs and Settings and check if you have Acer related bloatware pre-installed.
Things such as games (from Oberon media), and Acer related software such as empowering technology, help manuals, etc. which you don't use, and remove all of them (sans the drivers for the soundcard and camera of course).

I won't deny that 2GB RAM is not much... but even with that, the computer shouldn't really lag too much doing Facebook.

You can also download Ccleaner and check which programs you have running on startup.
You could remove everything except the touchpad and MSE (and Java if you want to keep the automated once per month updating option).

But as I said, make sure to remove the bloat programs from the system because that will definitely help you get rid of extra processes.