Slow running laptop

My laptop has been running very slow including start up, i know that my storage is starting to fill up so i'm thinking about transfering all my important files onto an external storage device and returning it back to facory settngs. Firstly will this help and if so which device would you recomend for value and ease of use.

 

There are a couple of things you can try beforehand, including:

Run a virus/malware scan
Defragment your hard drive, like O&O Defrag
Run a registry clean-up tool, like CCleaner
Disable unnecessary start-up items in msconfig, see this

 

That's why I keep most of my stuff on an external hard drive.

 

I have all my stuff on 2 different sources. Some is on 3 as a matter of fact or burned onto DVD's

 

slow computers are usually caused by either viruses or malware,or lack of maintenance.ripper has it on the nose.

 

yeah,i really should have qualified that statement.meant to say the things that cause a computer to slow down.

 

lol...now your covering your bases aldan

 

yeah,i could be a politician.lol.

 

not to try to change the subject or anything,but i wonder what happened to the op.did we scare them away?lol.

 

Those 8088 microprocessors are generally kind of slow.

 

Our traffic signal controllers that I used to work on had the same cpu that the old Atari computers had in them. MC6802.I retired from there 3 years ago.

http://mccain-inc.com/controllers/item/170-controllers/170e-controller.html

 

Thanks to you all for your advice it seems to have helped me out and it's given me new ideas.

 

glad it worked out for you.

 

I had a similar problem with my 4 year old Vista laptop, and the other things I did were:
- create a separate small disk partition and move the windows paging file to it (this avoids the paging file becoming fragmented)
- put the maximum memory in the laptop (this reduces the amount of paging, but note 4Mb is maximum for 32bit OS, and some laptops support less memory than this)
- install a faster/better disk drive (as my laptop used SATA drives I installed a 500Gb Seagate Momentus XT drive. This drive is a hybrid memory/disk unit so provides a halfway house to using an SSD drive, and had reduced start up times considerably)
- as I was using Vista and had an SD card reader built in, I put a card in and installed "Vista readyboost" (there is a similar facility under Win7 but not XP)