Hello! New here and could use advice please?

Hi there
I am new to your forum – well to any forum, so hello to all.

Can anyone advise me please?

I have just carried out a broadband speed check on a popular website and the results are that my download speed is 0.367 Mb/s and upload speed is 0.309 Mb/s.
My computer appears to have really slowed down a lot since yesterday and as this is the first time I have ever had cause to carry out a broadband speed check, I am not sure if this is an acceptable speed or whether I should be getting more.

My computer is a laptop/notebook Hp tx2000 vista home premium with 2gb ram and plenty of space on my 250gb hard drive.
At the time of writing I have only got internet explorer and Microsoft word running, I usually use firefox as my regular browser and the speed when using that is very similar to the above.
My aim is to speed up my machine again and any advice or information that anyone could give me regarding my concern would be very much appreciated.
Thanks very much,
Mark

 

Is only the internet slow? Are other programs behaving with normal speed?

 

Yes everything is running slow. Sometimes it is taking up to a minute for files to open in explorer that used to take a second or two to open and most internet pages are timing out on me owing to the erxtremely lon loading times.

Thank you for your response namaiki, I was away so only just picked up on it I'm afraid.

 

2GB RAM memory is not so much space these days. It's not expensive to buy it on the market, so another two GB's is a wise purchase, unrelated to the slowdown problem your computer's suffering from.

There are few general steps that you should take. Check out the Task Manager to see is there something that eats your virtual memory. Also, scan the entire system with the proper antivirus and the Malwarebytes', which is the best safety combo around.

You can also try another internet browser. Mozilla Firefox has a history of memory leak problems and they still haven't exterminated it.

 

Thanks very much MadHater, I have purchased another 2gb ram this morning, but when I opened up my machine I already had two chips there so I just shut it back up and will wait for my friend to guide me through the installation of my new chip. It looks like I will have to settle for 3gb for now though as I am assuming they are both 1gb chips that are installed at the moment.

Yes I done this also and the main thing that I recognised as using a lot of my resources is the anti-virus that I use called microsoft security essentials (mspeng) so I cant really turn that off. I seem to have a lot of instances of svc host using loads but I am very wary of shutting any of them down as the generic name might be fronting something really important and I dont want to end up worse off than I am now. I am not very tech minded and would not be in any position to repair any breakages I might cause.

I have done this with the security essentials and malwarebytes and both scans come up with no issues

I have been using google Chrome the last couple of days and it seems to be a bit quicker than what I have been used to when opening up webpages.
I really appreciate your help & hopefully when I install the new chip I will see an improvement in performance! :hi2: :thumbsup: