My Dell Inspiron 1150 Notebook runs so frustratingly slow, I don't know what to do. It takes 5 minutes to boot up; if I send something to the printer (HP Deskjet) I have to walk away and do something else and come back to it at least 10 minutes later. If I have more than 2 programs open at once, such as Quicken, Word and Firefox, or even just multiple tabs open in Firefox, everything slows to a crawl. I changed the autostart function in programs I don't need to run all the time, I have defragmented and done everything the computer System Tools offered to free up disc space.
My hard drive has 14.5 GB free space out of 33.7 GB total size. I have 384 MB of RAM. Can either of these memories be increased, and would that help? Can anyone other than Dell work on this laptop? Is there anything else I can do to improve the performance?
What Operating System do you run? If it is Windows XP SP2 (Home Edition or professional), here are some things you can do to speed up your system. 1st you should remove all programs that are not required from the start menu. Start > Run > Msconfig > startup tab. Unselect all that are not necessary. Also Right click on my computer > properties > Advanced > Performance settings > Adjust for best performance. This should speed things up a little. I would recommend atleast 512 MB of memory to run Windows XP and its applications decently. You should consider an upgrade.
This is a very specific problem to the 1150 Inspiron. I've been a PC tech for a long time and rarely do you see a problem like this, it is quite unusual. For posterity, I will post the solution I found to this problem. I found the information from the nice fellow at this site: http://www.windowsbbs.com/windows-xp/368...
(Credit to Steve R. Jones)
"The Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop has a unique problem: Its performance slows by an astonishing 90 percent when Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 2 security update is installed. Dell has a remedy for the problem, but you'd be hard-pressed to find it in the company's online tech-support information. We have a simple fix of our own.
If you own a Dell Inspiron 1150 with a Celeron processor and Service Pack 2 and it seems to be running very slowly, install the Dell security patch or follow these six steps:
Open the Power Options Control Panel and write down the time-out settings for the Portable/Laptop scheme (which will undoubtedly be selected).
Click on the Delete button to delete Dell's Portable/Laptop scheme.
Choose the scheme Max Battery, then click on Apply.
Click on the Save As button, and type "Portable/Laptop," then click on OK.
Change the time-out settings to match the ones you wrote down (or whatever other settings you want to use), then click on Apply.
Click on OK to exit the Control Panel.
You will know that the fix worked if the Task Manager (accessed when you press the Control/Alt/Delete keys simultaneously) shows only 1 percent processor usage for the taskmgr.exe process. When it's running slow, taskmgr.exe uses about 14 percent. "
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I am running Windows XP Home Ed., so I took your advice on the performance settings. I also unchecked a couple of things in the Start Up tab. Unfortunately, there are a lot of cryptic abbreviations in that tab, and I don't know which cannot be unchecked without hurting the functions of some programs. I will try to find out who can upgrade the memory, too. I'm about to restart, so we'll see how it goes... Thanks for your assistance!
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