Windows and IE weirdness and other questions

[Adam_P]

To the folks that might know...

My laptop, the one that I do virtually all of my work and day to day stuff on, is starting to do weird stuff every now and again.

For instance, I'll hit the reply button to a post on the forum and it will lock up and either come up with the 'not responding' box or the chip and fan will kick into an incredibly high gear and after a minute or so it will work.

Also, it has occasional problems shutting down and has to wait for processes to finish, rather than switching off.

The whole thing just seems to be struggling more than it has any need to. It doesn't do that much and never that many processes at one time. (Although, I do occasionally have Photoshop, Dreamweaver, IE, OE and MSN running together, swapping between screens. But it just seems to be struggling.

I was wondering about doing a defrag on the HD, as it hasn't been done in a long time. But does this actually do any good?

The HD is about 55% full, so its got plenty of space left (about 24-25GB). I use this machine for almost everything and can't really afford for it to fall over on me. At least, not at this precise moment in time.
Anyone got any advice they can give me?

I'm fully up to date with McAfee Antivirus and Security Centre, have Windows Defender installed and have Spybot installed too which I run on a regular basis. Nothing has come up with any problems...

Yours confused
Adam
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Colin McRae MBE 1968 - 2007 RIP
Orwell Rolls in his Grave
God is imaginary

[Rob W]

Try a defrag mate, it cant hurt.
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'16 GSX-S1000F

[AcIdBuRnZ]

Do a defrag and post here fragmented %

Ideally you should never let the drive become more than 10% fragmented.

And yes, it does a lot of good! Especially when it comes to start up/shut down times.

But.... the cheapest and best performance gain is a simple memory upgrade
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Past: Honda NSR125R >> Kawasaki ER-5a2 >> Kawasaki ZZR-600e1 >> Suzuki GSXR-750Y >> Honda VTR 1000 Firestorm
"Chickity China the Chinese Chicken..."

[lllN30lll]

Stop bloody using IE for a start! lol

you'll get raped on any sites that contain malicious scripts.

best thing to do is install Opera or Firefox as your browser
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Turbo R1
CRF450R

[craigie b]

photoshop will use your hard drive as a scratch disk which can slow your pc down and cause other programs to freeze as it writes to the hard drive...this would be especially noticeable if you have a small amount of memory (i.e. 512mb) and/or a slow than usual harddrive (which is normally the case with a laptop).

If you hard drive is fragmented then it could be a combination of all three!

[djr]

[craigie b]

[djr]