I'm using a Lenovo Ideapad S145 with an Intel Pentium CPU 5405U running at 2.30GHz. It has 4GB of RAM, but only about 3.88GB is usable. My Task Manager constantly shows the disk usage at 100%. I'm running Windows 11 and I don't have antivirus software. As a non-technical user, my laptop is incredibly slow, often hanging, and it takes forever to open any files or applications like Chrome or Word. What can I do to make it run smoother without spending much money?
3 Answers
Your laptop's performance is pretty limited due to its specs, especially with just 4GB of RAM and likely an old hard drive. Upgrading to an SSD would be the biggest boost for your performance—something like a 120-240GB SSD can make a huge difference. Also, run some commands like 'chkdsk /f /r' in Command Prompt and 'sfc /scannow' to check for issues. Making sure you're freeing up disk space and optimizing your settings for performance is essential too!
First off, check what apps are running when your laptop starts up. You can do this in Task Manager by going to the Startup tab. Disabling unnecessary apps can really help speed things up since it stops them from launching automatically. Every little bit counts!
Consider switching to a lightweight operating system like a Linux distribution. I had the same RAM issues on a similar laptop—Windows was taking way too much of it and even using the hard drive as swap space, which is a bad sign. Linux can run really well on lower specs and often only uses 1GB of RAM when idle.
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