How can I speed up my girlfriends notebook?

My GF's notebook feels pretty slow. I was thinking it might just be Vista slowing everything down.
I try to update her notebook too and it says that it cannot update because there is a corrupted file in her operating system.
Will a Windows 7 upgrade fix this problem?
I was thinking maybe upgrading the RAM and downloading Windows 7(64-bit)?

Any ideas guys?

Here is the notebooks information.
Dell 1420
CPU- Intel Core 2 Duo 1.5GHz
RAM- 2GB
OS- Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit
HDD- 160GB

 

You'll probably find a ton of useful info in the 'dummy' guide articles - not that I'm calling you a dummy, I read em too!

Notebook Dummy Guide Articles

You're better off doing a reformat+ fresh install of Win7 rather than just an upgrade; though it's more work it's much more likely to improve matters. Check the machine + processor is 64-bit compatible. There's a utlity that will automatically check this for you that you can download from the Windows 7 home page (just google "win 7 64 compatibility tool" or some such.

I've read 2GB of RAM is bare minimum for Vista (if you want to run aero stuff) but Win 7 is much better with memory so you might not need more RAM, though it never hurts. Depends what sort of stuff your GF's using the notebook for. Check out this thread too for upgrade ideas

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...s/498725-what-your-best-notebook-upgrade.html

 

Windows 7 is not much "lighter" than Vista, so I doubt upgrading to the newer OS will improve matters. A low capacity SSD may be a way to inject some life into the system without spending a fortune.

 

A slim chance that your hard drive might be dying?

Assuming that the hardware is good, a Windows 7 upgrade via an upgrade install, will probably fix any file system issues, but probably won't speed up the OS much, especially if you've got a ton of junk on it.

A clean install should, but I think a clean install of Vista would do almost as well. Else I'd second the suggestion of getting a small SSD over a RAM upgrade, unless the user is doing a lot of memory intensive work?

 

Vista runs well on that configuration. Back up her documents, get a new hard drive of the same capacity for about $50, get new RAM sticks of the same capacity for about $50, a clean install of the OS will make her laptop fresh and fast again.

 

Second that. Fix the OS first, then if that's not enough, go to hardware upgrades. Hardware upgrades would certainly help, but a properly functioning OS may be good enough (and free!)