Running slow 9300

[Frank Hill]

Dell Inspiron 9300 running slow, I have disk frag, disk clean up, any other suggestions? I believe the ram cannot be upped from 2 gb.
Thank you
Frank

 

[das_stig]

The only benefiticial upgrade would be to an SSD, but don't go for the fastest and most expensive, as your SATA controller is the bottleneck.

Go a big and cheap SSD.

No point in running faster ram, asit will down clock to your exisiting speed of 533mhz.

 

[photonboy]

To be clear, is this SLOWER than usual like you've had it for a long time now it's a lot worse?

If so, it sounds like a software issue. If so, my advice is:

1) Backup the C-drive if possible (Acronis True Image free for WD, DiscWizard for Seagate) to a secondary hard drive. Or at least backup your critical data like pictures etc.

2) RESTORE the backup image which should be on a hidden partition (may be started with an F-Key on startup but you'd need to look into that)

3) Get the updated DRIVERS for motherboard, video card.. (dell site should have software to manage that)

4) Reinstall programs.

OTHER:
If you had a spare hard drive laying around, you could unhook your current drive then install Windows 10 Technical Preview and see how your system performs. If it ran stably then it would indicate how Windows 8 would work (I update my dad's old laptop to Windows 8 and it worked far, far better. It had 2GB of system RAM as well).

I'm willing to bet since it's almost 10-years old you've got a lot of software issues built up over time. It's likely Windows 8 would make it work far better than replacing the drive with an SSD. Also, if you got an SSD you'd likely have to buy a new copy of Windows unless the backup Image would restore to a separate drive.

 

[Ck1_13]

How long have you had Windows installed on your PC, they tend to slow down over time, due to multiple things.

- Software being installed/uninstalled leaves traces that make your windows registry fat.
- Spyware, Virii clog things up
- Too many startup items at windows boot.
- conflicting or ghosted drivers

You basically need troubleshooting , and online that takes forever, if you can your best bet is to reformat, as stated above. If not, try a tutorial on MSConfig, you may simple need to eliminate extra overhead at boot