[binny]

I have been having much trouble with my laptop over the past few months.

The problems include: video problems - when watching movies it will be good for abit then start to lag up. The video will slowly get choppy then freeze and just display one frame about every 5 seconds. I have to pause the video and wait a few mins before it will be watchable, but it will do this again every few minutes. I have this same problem if I try to play any games. For videos, flash player causes the most problems.

At first I thought I might've just damaged my video card, but the problems have been spreading.

When I start up windows, the music intro that plays (default one) is often very choppy and distorted. I also have been gettings huge lag spikes when a program is running (ex: photoshop) in which I wont even be able to click anything or move my mouse for several minutes. This sometimes happens when I hardly have anything running. My music often will cut out at the first sign that something else is running or starting up.

I figured something is eating up my memory (will often go to 100% cpu usage) but I have scanned with many programs (AVG, ad aware, spy bot, ewido, ccleaner, cleanup!, cwshredder and so on) which have found a few minor problems and repaired them, but there is no change in my laptops performance.

Here is a few specs that might be of use:

Intel Celeron
2.59 GHz
480 mb ram
over 18 gigs free on 40 gig hd



any help?
thanks in advance

edit - basically I want to know if there is some other stuff I can try doing that will help get my performance back to normal apart from reformatting or buying new hardware. Both of those options are someone out of the question for me. (dont really have proper windows cds or w/e for reformat)

[Ethereal_Dragon]

Hit CTRL + ALT + DELETE and click on the processes tabs. Then, click on the CPU colum, and find out what processes are using up all of the CPU power. What kind of temperatures are you seeing??

[binny]

Im guessing the problem being caused by heat and lack of memory.

How would I find out if this stick of ram is compatible with my laptop?
Newegg.com - CORSAIR ValueSelect 512MB 200-Pin DDR SO-DIMM DDR 333 (PC 2700) Notebook Memory - Retail

[atomic tofu]

use siw....gtopala...it will tell you what makes up your system and maybe slot...etc

[ECTech]

you might just need a basic cleaning, try ccleaner & cleanup!. then maybe a defrag would help.

[Nick]

about the memory use the crucial scanner, google crucial scanner and click on the second one, its very good