Laptop

[secsee1]

I have been given an oldish Toshiba satellite laptop that is running so slow it is unbelievable, as there is nothing on it that I want I went into add/remove programs and took off loads of stuff (its running Win XP by the way) but even after that it is still painfully slow, somebody told me that I should
"return to factory setting" but how do I do that? will it help? and will it then lose Win XP? any help would be much appreciated.

[chas2008]

its quite possible its slow because its an old spec laptop, memory,processer etc...just cant keep up with modern programs.
Also because we use modern updated PCs we forget how slow the earlier ones were which were acceptable at the time...

[nannybooby]

have you checked how much free disk you have ? Run a clean disk then defrag see if t is freed up more space if not you could try buying an extra mem board

[Squitty]

what model is it - I have an old satellite pro that came with a recovery disc for resetting. If it came with XP then you wont lose it ( mine still has win 98). Mine was slow because I had norton antivirus and only 256 memory. I would also keep mine tidy by running a registry cleaner - make sure you kow what you are doing with this though

[secsee1]

Thanks so far for your answers, not sure what model it is as it's at home and I'm not at the moment but I will try a disk clean and defrag to see if that makes any difference

[chas2008]

defrag & disk clean very rarely makes a startling difference to performance usually quite small if even noticable at all...

[joean2011]

return to factory setting is just setting at BIOS,hope this can help u!

[gramsey438]

Apart from possible malware the main culprit for slow running machines is lack of memory, if you are running XP then I would suggest you have 1GB or more preferably 3GB, anything less than this and your machine will be constantly accessing the hard drive for data rather than caching it within the ram.

Another thing to check is things that are starting up every time you boot the machine. The more that is loaded up at startup the more memory that is eaten up and less is available for the Operating system.