HD speed very slow on notebook

[Joel]

I have an Acer travelmate 212TE with a small problem.

The HD is very slow, its a 10gb drive with DMA active, defraged drive and
as optimise as I can get it, but the HD is very slow.

When I first bought the computer it had XP home and I could swear that it
ran much faster then it does now.

about a year ago or less I installed XP Pro and the computer seems to run
very slow regarding HD access.

I've checked the Acer website for any software I might need for the
notebook above what XP might install and there is nothing regarding HD
software or drivers.

I have 256 mb of memory and the HD is at 7mb used, 3 clear.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to why its so slow.

oh, its an Intel Celeron 800mhz.

Joel.

 

[Kevin]

A 10 GB drive is, by today's standards, tiny. An Intel Celeron processor
running at 800 mHZ is, by today's standards, slow. 256 MB of RAM is, by
today's standards, not enough.

I don't know what the rotational speed of your hard drive is, but I will bet
it is not 7200 rpm. Your notebook sounds like it is several years old. At
this point upgrading components would not be cost effective. For what you
would spend on a new, large, fast hard drive, 512 MB of RAM and a new
Pentium processor, you would have about half the cost of a new notebook. If
your present notebook can even be upgraded at all.

For now, check what is loading at startup. Do away with anything not
absolutely needed to run the system and boot up Windows. Check your
Internet Explorer cache and dump it frequently to free up space. The more
headroom you can give the operating system, especially XP Pro, the better
off you will be.

Start shopping for a new notebook. There are some incredible deals out
there if you look.