Toshiba laptop nightmare

So, I am talking to a mate in my local restaurant/bar as we watch England teach Australia the finer points of the game of cricket.

Apparently he has two identical Tosh lappies which have been in a closet for 3 years because they performed so badly after a few months. I tell him to bring them to me................

Toshiba L300D model with a 1.9 AMD dual core of some sort and a date of mid-2008?

I kicked one off...................went back to the bar and finished off getting drunk :D then came home and found that it had just loaded Windows Vista...................not my favourite OS?:drink:

So I looked and saw that it was running 106 processes on startup!..................arrrrgh!

It had 1 GB of RAM ( single channel) that would run at 667. MHz, even though it was 800MHz DDR2.............single channel I suppose, and the FSB clockspeed?

So...........rather than watch paint dry for excitement, or turn myself into an alchoholic..............I took the RAM out of #2 and put it in #1..................amazing increase in performance!!!!

I then ran my usual diagnostics and optimisation tools (if you want advice and links please feel free to post to this thread.............I only recommend free stuff unless you tell me you have a commercial application)

THe WEI went from 3.1 to 3.7 and you could see the difference!

How in hell Toshiba were allowed to sell that crap with a Vista sticker on it, I do not know?

OH! I cut the processes down to 66 from 106;)

My Toshiba is about 6 years old and runs fine. Yep Vista. But that 2nd stick of ram and cleaning out scheduled tasks really helps out.

Hi Shay,

Yeah, it works pretty good now.............a bit like that ASUS eeePC that we have discussed in another thread....... I put 2GB of RAM in that and it works real well now. In my opinion you take what Microsoft says is the MINIMUM specification and multiply by 2 to get to a comfortable computing experience..................go higher for better?

Another slow down is the temp files.

Clean them up nicely with TFC (Temp File Cleaner) by oldtimer.
Advantage over Ccleaner is there is no reg cleaner in it. Great for new users and I run it about weekly. The most cleaned off of a clients rig, 7.4 GB. That thing started flying afterward.

TFC only cleans temp folders. TFC will not clean URL history, prefetch, or cookies. Depending on how often someone cleans their temp folders, their system hardware, and how many accounts are present, it can take anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or more. TFC will completely clear all temp files where other temp file cleaners may fail. TFC requires a reboot immediately after running. Be sure to save any unsaved work before running TFC.

Sometime bad PC performance is caused by "garbage" in the system registry. It's a good idea to clean it regularly.

I would love getting $10 for every time I had to post, Time to do a clean install, because some one had used a reg cleaner and it messed up that computer. I could retire again.

Clean up regularly really helps a lot in nay kindor brand of laptop. It is how someone taking care of their laptops.