Older laptop is insanely slow

So my dad has an old p4 laptop with 512mb of ram

He uses it mostly for web-surfing and office work (MS Office)

A few months back I reformatted his pc and everything was nice and zippy

Now he's been saying its sluggish. I was looking over it, and it is insanely sluggish, about 1-3 minutes just to open up FF

I looked at task manager, and it said total memory 500, available 30

The only thing running was Nod32 AV

Does anyone have any ideas whats eating all the RAM?
It was fine before

Thanks

 

Is there any chance that the P4 laptop is upgradeable to 1gb? If so- by all means get another stick of RAM.

I am not sure if he's tried Avast or Microsoft Security Essentials also. I hear that Norton is so-so when it comes to reliability.

 

I was thinking of upgrading soon since there is a free slot, but the thing I'm wondering is what's eating all the RAM right now

After the re-format the pc was running fine, Firefox, word, etc. were as quick as one would expect, now though it's pathetic, trying to make it better without having to re-format

Also, its ESET Nod32, which is actually really light on system resources

 

If you have an internet browser open, microsoft word open, and another application... that 512mb is breakfast! If your Dad does not want to change the antivirus and money is not particularly a problem- upgrade!

What type of laptop does your Dad have?

 

Open Task Manager > Sort Memory highest to lowest. That will give you an idea of which program is eating up memory. You might also be dealing with spyware, my two favorite programs that I use is superantispyware and malwarebytes. If those don't work, try a defrag and ccleaner.

 

Do you have gadgets on your desktop area???

 

As you guys recommended, I ran full scans with Nod32 AV, as well as with malwarebytes
A full clean-up using CCleaner and a defrag

Everything was clean, so I guess its clean, and the sluggishness is due to the RAM

I am going to go and buy another stick of 512MB ram, so the total is 1Gb, should be all fine then, but I just want to know what is currently using the RAM

I got some screens, one of the memory when I booted up and it was idling, and one of the processes at that time
Can someone tell me what could be using the memory, or is it just windows?



Thanks

 

It may also be a hardware issue. Check the event log for hard drive errors. Try a defrag if there are none. Often times before a hard drive completely crashes, symptoms like sluggishness occur. And definitely upgrade to at least 1GB of RAM. And since it's an older laptop, it may be a good idea to clean out any dust that may be trapped in the fans and heatsink. Overheating can also cause sluggishness.

 

I used to own a Thinkpad T30 that had a 1.8ghz P4. I initially started out with 256mb of RAM, an old 4200rpm hard drive, and XP SP3.

Very slow and loads of page filing!

Just before the sale it was running with 1gb of RAM and a 5400rpm hard drive. The OS was still XP SP3 but I can say that it ran a lot better!

Good luck!

 

I had all those were in mind
Already did a full error scan with HDTune and it was clean, now running one using the windows utility
I cleaned it while closed using compressed air and quite a bit of dust came out, but I need to open it up and brush out the heatsink, just having a bit of trouble taking it apart (going to make another thread on that)

Same story here , although disk is already 5400 but I think the processor is the same
Going to go and get the RAM tonight, hopefully DDR is still available here

Thanks for the info guys

 

I would turn off searchindexer, make sure office quickstart isn't enabled. Those tend to bog down systems.