Laptop Questions

[Hawk1]

Just a couple of questions for the laptop savvy.

My wife has an older (2004) Fujitsu Lifebook C series notebook. It has a Pentium M 1.6GHz processor in it. It's run sluggish pretty much from day one. By sluggish, I mean opening any programs takes a while, waking up from sleep or first powering on takes a while 'til it is ready. I have tried everything I could think of to speed it up (disable any unnecessary startup programs/services, disable HDD indexing, defrag etc) with minimal improvement.

Anyways, I never thought RAM was an issue, as when I check taskmanager performance, it says she has 512MB total and usually a couple of hundred MB available at any given time. When I checked the spec's with Belarc Advisor, it said she had 256MB of RAM in 1 DIMM slot and another 256 as On-board RAM. I have since found out it uses 1 256MB 200pin PC2100 DDR266 stick and I have now ordered a 1GB PC2700 DDR333 to put in it.

So my questions are:

1. What is on-board RAM and how is it used (ie-is it shared with the Intel "extreme graphic's") and is this the performance issue she's having?

2. Will upgrading to the 1GB stick of RAM significantly improve the performance (I'm hoping so) or is it the Processor holding it back.

Any advice/suggestions/comments are appreciated.

Thx

[Wile E]

On board ram just means that it is actually soldered to the board. The ram will help some, but I'm willing to bet a 7200rpm hard drive will give the boost you're after. You most likely have a 4800 or 5200rpm drive. They make disk access painfully slow to those used to desktop computers.

[Hawk1]

Thanks. Wile E. Also forgot to mention she is on XP Pro SP2 and uses 2007 Norton Internet security (which I'm sure doesn't help the performance:) ).

[Wile E]

Thanks. Wile E. Also forgot to mention she is on XP Pro SP2 and uses 2007 Norton Internet security (which I'm sure doesn't help the performance:) ).
No problem.

SP2 isn't bad, if you trim some of the unnecessary services. Mine boots to 150mb with all my apps/drivers installed. about 100mb without the piggish ATI drivers.

But the Norton is probably hurtin it some. lol Although 2007 is much easier on it than earlier versions.

[Hawk1]

But the Norton is probably hurtin it some. lol Although 2007 is much easier on it than earlier versions.[/QUOTE]

lol, ya she had 2004 Norton installed prior to that. What a PIA to remove and update. Thanks again.

[DanTheBanjoman]

Did you try reinstalling Windows? If that doesn't help I'd put my money on the harddrive.

[Hawk1]

Did you try reinstalling Windows? If that doesn't help I'd put my money on the harddrive.

It never came with the Window's Cd, but it had a bunch of restore CD's. I guess this will be a last resort if the 1GB memory doesn't help. Would need to back up some of the critical files first (we do our taxes and some bookeeping on it, as well as have the kids photos etc on it).