Why is this Laptop soooo slow?


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I have this old Acer Aspire 7520 17" laptop. This laptop has always been ridiculously slow! It came with Vista 32bit, I reformatted and install Windows 7 64bit and it's improved somewhat, but it's still generally sluggish & laggy.

Sometimes it seems like it's snappy but then it'll become unresponsive for some seconds.

I've even installed Ubuntu on it but that's probably slower than Win 7.

I am not really too concerned with this Laptop, but out of interest I'd try and understand why it's so damn slow! It reminds me of my old HP desktop that had 24MB of RAM and 4GB HD.

The specs:

- AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor TK-55 (1.8GHz, 2 x 256 KB L2 cache)

- Up to 384MB NVIDIA GeForce 7000M TurboCache

- 1GB DDR2

- 80GB HDD

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Could do with another GB of RAM at least, you must have Windows 7 32bit installed, 64bit needs 2GB RAM minimum iirc, if you have somehow installed 64bit with 1GB RAM, there is your problem

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I know installing Windows 7 sp1 slowed my netbook wayyyy down.

Had to get rid of it.

Also helps when you keep your laptop cooled down -- keep it elevated for air circulation, and clean out dust build-up.

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Could do with another GB of RAM at least, you must have Windows 7 32bit installed, 64bit needs 2GB RAM minimum iirc, if you have somehow installed 64bit with 1GB RAM, there is your problem

When you say "somehow", do you mean it shouldn't have let me, because I wouldn't have tried to bypass it.

Also, I have a desktop with similar specs and it's fine with 1GB of ram, mind you that's Win7 32bit.

I know installing Windows 7 sp1 slowed my netbook wayyyy down.

Had to get rid of it.

I have Win7 SP1 on two other machines & it's fine

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Upgrade the RAM first and see if that helps, down grade to 32 bit aswell if possible :)

If you can afford it... a new SSD drive will improve the performance massively.

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this laptop has Windows Vista 32-bit. it is very slow due to flash player and keep crashing. I upgrade 3GB to 4GB RAM memory card, but it failed. I will buy new computer soon.

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When you say "somehow", do you mean it shouldn't have let me, because I wouldn't have tried to bypass it.

Also, I have a desktop with similar specs and it's fine with 1GB of ram, mind you that's Win7 32bit.

If you want to run Windows 7 on your PC, here's what it takes:


  • 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor

  • 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)

  • 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)

  • DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

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Upgrade the RAM first and see if that helps, down grade to 32 bit aswell if possible :)

If you can afford it... a new SSD drive will improve the performance massively.

No need to downgrade to the 32-bit variant of Windows 7.

OP: Get 4 GB RAM with your current 64-bit OS and you'll be much better off. If you can install an SSD, even better!

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More RAM would help (upping it to 4GB would probably do wonders), also you state the size of the HDD, but not the speed of it. Like most laptops thats probably a 5400 RPM drive, that'll have some impact on it's "snappyness" too.

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