[QUOTE=Albert;2787834]Hard drives can be slow, some monumentally slow. Even with substantial amounts of RAM, this will make for slow loading of applications, saving of files, etc. This is important, as many apps cache files to the hard drive, requiring many small writes, which will impact general performance.
And 3 GB of RAM is low for Windows 7. Just having a browser open along with one or two other apps (like a music player) can use up whatever Windows doesn’t need for itself. I find that even 4 GB is the bare minimum for my use these days.
So, when all the RAM is used, Windows will turn to the hard drive as virtual RAM. That means the OS will kick stuff out of real RAM & write to the hard drive. Depending on how much RAM your apps need, this can result in frequent slowdowns.
And if, for some reason, your hard drive (or other hardware in your system) is slowly becoming unhealthy, things get even slower as error correction kicks in. While 1 reallocated sector isn’t terrible, there may be other things the hard drive is having to compensate for on the fly.
But the front-facing issue is probably just a lack of RAM.[/QUOTE]
Thanks for the reply Albert. Not to argue, just information, but the laptop came with 3 GB RAM and Windows 7 Home Premium x64 and worked fine until the last couple of years when it starts slowing down until it finally became almost unusable.
Question: Since the HD has a bad sector could it be failing, which seems to be what you were talking about. And, since my daughter is now a working RN, she bought herself another computer and this one is now mine and I plan to update the RAM. But I would really like to get the computer working before I invest in new RAM.
Also, task manager says that something is using low 80’s to low 90’s percent of the physical memory all the time. Could this be a HD failing. Thanks.
