SLOW dell laptop

[SKA]

My mum (who knows nothing about computers) bought a laptop from dell (with my dads money) and when she got it, it was rubbish as in it's really ridiculously slow. So she just left it lying around the house for a few months along with the printer she also bought without a lead or ink (I got the lead from an old printer).
Anyway my question is how can I get it to speed up so she stops using mine? Can I delete everything of it and then install it all again? Or will that just mess it up even more? I deleted a few unnecessary things of it and it did speed up for a while but them it went back to slow mode. Any help?!?!?

[vehelpfulguy]

The speed of a PC or laptop depends on a number of things, but I guess the main two are CPU (Processor) and
Real Memory.

If you can give us details of the CPU, real memory and operating system (Windows version) we can tell you if it should be ok or may run slow.

For example, some laptops are sold with Windows Vista on them, but only 512Mb of memory.

512Mb of memory is just not enough to run Windows Vista.

Also Intel make some slow CPUs called Celeron, and if you have a Celeron CPU, and also not much real memory, it will run slow.

DONT delete everything and start again as that is not likely to make it go faster (unless you have a virus).

First thing, let us know the CPU type, memory size and operating system. You can find this out by selecting an option called System Information from one of the menus.

[fo3nix]

If it was a new laptop, then it'll be more than fast enough for the sorts of things she wants... all computers sold these days are plenty fast enough for word processing, browsing the web, checking email etc.

Does it come with Vista?

My suggestion would be to install Ubuntu on it. This comes with its own word processor, web browser, email client etc., is totally free, and won't attract viruses like Windows does. What's more, it'll also run a lot faster than Vista will do on the laptop. http://www.ubuntu.org

If it came with XP, and you have XP discs, then re-format completely, to get back to a fresh install without all the bumf that Dell has probably installed onto it (Norton AV, etc.).

[SKA]

It has windows vista but I dont know what the memory on it is like. I suspect it does have a small memory as it was only cheap. I'll have a look at later and let you know.