Acer Aspire One extremely slow!

[kronen88]

My cousin has given me her Acer Aspire One to take a look at as it's very slow and thinks there may be viruses.

I have ran a scan with both AVG Free and MalwareBytes.
AVG detected one virus and removed it.

The laptop is still terribly slow.
It only has 1gb of ram and an Atom N450 CPU @ 1.66ghz

I was considering upgrading the ram to 2gb and switching the hdd to an ssd. Would this resolve the issue with performance or is it just tat now?

 

[kronen88]

Also after checking out the performance tab in task manager i can see that during system idle the cpu usage is still between 50-100%.
Memory is around 800mb/1gb.

 

[rgd1101]

What is using the cpu during system idle?

 

[jaguarskx]

To begin with, the Atom N450 is a pretty weak CPU. It is a single core CPU with Hyper Threading which means it as one "real" core and one "virtual" core.

As suggested by rgd1101, you should use Task Manager to see what processes are running when the laptop is simply idling. If there is a hard drive activity LED that is always flashing, then it is possible that there is a lot of data swapping between RAM and the PageFile, upgrading the RAM can alleviate this, but you should first see what is causing the CPU to be idling between 50% - 100%.

It is a pretty old laptop since it was released sometime back in 2010 I think. It is possible the Windows Registry may have become bloated over time and may be the reason why the CPU is running at 50% - 100%. CCleaner can be used to clean up invalid entries in the Registry, but the best way to ensure the Registry is not bloated is to reinstall Windows.