Hi, I am at my Mums and her computer is really really dreadful. I was wondering if any of you have any advice on how to speed it up a little. It is technically better than my own computer but it runs awfully slow compared to mine.
Make: Acer.
OS: vista home premium
Intel core 2 duo procesor 1.66GHz 667 Mhz 2mb l2 cache
intel graphics media acelerator 950
it says 160gb but I think it is 2 70gb partitions with the last 20gb maybe being hidden back up?
1GB ddr2
I feel it should run quite a bit quicker than what it does. any pointers to improve the performance would be greatly appreciated. I have already tidied the desktop and got rid of about 20 icons. I have changed it to 16 bit and reduced the resolution. would moving the files from C: to D: help? as D: has nothing on it?
The suggestions in this thread so far are good. Removing desktop items is a good idea too. Not you don't have a video card, from the list you posted, so you can't really expect great video playback performance regardless of the name of the onboard video GPU.
How much total free disk space is in your hard-drive? How much free disk space does the Vista OS drive have? If there's very few GB free then you should delete excess files as that will help. Defragging the hard drive is a good idea too. I recommend getting something like Auslogics free hard drive defragger (many times more efficient than XP's deframenter; I have no experience with Vista's defragmenter). You can also get a program like CCleaner to remove broken notations in the Registry which will speed up some activity as well.
Also look at the Startup folder. You can remove some programs from that folder to make the PC start faster.
Running a lean anti-virus/anti-malaware is a good idea too. MSE is a good idea (mentioned), as might be running something like Ad-Aware once in a while. Malware might be monopolizing resources (check processes and look them up on the internet to see if any are malicious/unnecessary).
Updating your components' drivers might help too.
Sidenote:
Are you sure you have only 1 hard drive? Partitioning a lone harddrive is probably pointless. If you have a back-up external drive, you might try copying your valuable info and program to the external drive, and then reformat your computer's drive and reinstall Vista without a partition.
If you have any budget and slots for extra RAM, consider getting a pair of 2GB sticks of the DDR that your motherboard accepts. Is this a laptop by the way?
It's also probably a good time for upgrading to an Intel iCore series, since they are on sale due to newer components being near release. i3-based laptops are $400 these days, and a i5-based desktop PC can be built from $400 worth of components (probably $600+ for pre-built).