I'm in the process of trying to improve the performance of my daughter's Vaio PCG-21313M notebook. It's had very little use in the time since it was bought new a few years ago. It turns out that my daughter stopped using it as it had become slow and unresponsive. It has an Intel Atom N740 1.83GHz processor and 1GB RAM running Windows 7 Starter.
At first, it was certainly sluggish and took ages to respond, particularly when loading pages from the internet.
Task Manager was indicating very high memory use (75% average), even when idling with no internet connection or programs running. There were 68 processes running, some of which I was able to stop without causing problems. That didn't seem to make much difference to the level of memory use.
I cloned the original hard drive (250GB 5400) to a 500GB 7200 and installed the upgrade. The new drive works fine. I then did a clean reinstall of the OS and uninstalled unnecessary programs such as Norton and Mcaffee (I have a subscription to Mcafee which I haven't yet installed on the notebook). I haven't as yet installed a web browser or attempted to connect to the internet. I've stopped as many processes as the system will allow me to, such as Vaio Care and Vaio Update. I've downloaded and installed all Windows updates. Having done all those things and leaving the system to idle, Task Manager is now indicating a physical memory use of 45%. CPU usage is around 1%. I'm aware that 1GB memory isn't a lot by today's standards, but my question is, should that level of usage be considered normal on a healthy machine running as described above? I am awaiting delivery of a 2GB memory stick, the maximum which the notebook will take. If installed successfully, should I expect the drop in usage to read something obvious like 22% or is it not as simple as that? My main concern is that when running an anti-virus program, accessing the internet or anything else, this machine won't perform to a usable level. I'd appreciate any advice or thoughts, particularly to those out there who have experience of similar issues.
At first, it was certainly sluggish and took ages to respond, particularly when loading pages from the internet.
Task Manager was indicating very high memory use (75% average), even when idling with no internet connection or programs running. There were 68 processes running, some of which I was able to stop without causing problems. That didn't seem to make much difference to the level of memory use.
I cloned the original hard drive (250GB 5400) to a 500GB 7200 and installed the upgrade. The new drive works fine. I then did a clean reinstall of the OS and uninstalled unnecessary programs such as Norton and Mcaffee (I have a subscription to Mcafee which I haven't yet installed on the notebook). I haven't as yet installed a web browser or attempted to connect to the internet. I've stopped as many processes as the system will allow me to, such as Vaio Care and Vaio Update. I've downloaded and installed all Windows updates. Having done all those things and leaving the system to idle, Task Manager is now indicating a physical memory use of 45%. CPU usage is around 1%. I'm aware that 1GB memory isn't a lot by today's standards, but my question is, should that level of usage be considered normal on a healthy machine running as described above? I am awaiting delivery of a 2GB memory stick, the maximum which the notebook will take. If installed successfully, should I expect the drop in usage to read something obvious like 22% or is it not as simple as that? My main concern is that when running an anti-virus program, accessing the internet or anything else, this machine won't perform to a usable level. I'd appreciate any advice or thoughts, particularly to those out there who have experience of similar issues.
