Laptop Problemdiagnosis

[Ave]

I have been looking for a similar post but I couldn't find it.

My laptop is an acer intel R Celeron purchased in Thailand, with 248 MB of RAM, Windows XP 2002 version.

After years of humidity spent in an open space above water it has recently upgraded to an air-con environment but is nevertheless getting unbearably slow. DvDs freeze after 5 minutes of watching and music is also nearly impossible to play without breaking up. I have removed all the unecessary applications and disabled most services from the start-up configuration. Still, I sometimes can hardly open more than two or three applications at the same time. I tried defragmenting more frequently but there is an area of C: that is not repairable. I also tried to use hotmail but I found that I cannot enable cookies and I don't know why. Are these anomalies or is it all clearly explainable?

Someone mentioned that I need an upgrade. I'm slightly anxious to take my laptop to any shop as my knowledge of IT and its terminology are very limited. The last time I took it to the shop that sold it to me some idiot deleted the content of the whole C: and replaced my genuine windows with a pirate copy without solving the problem and I know I'm not the only one.

Can somebody please suggest in simple English what it could be, if a windows or a memory upgrade is due for example.

Do you know a place where I could safely leave my laptop to be looked at?

Thanks a lot

Edited June 24, 2008 by Ave

[JohnC]

Liberty Computers on third road about 200 yards past tot offices just before you turn of to the back entrance to carrfour.

[Ave]

cheers!

[A_Traveller]

What's the size of the hard disk? How full is it? If you go Right-Click on My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced tab -> Visual effects ... Settings -> Advanced tab what is the paging file size?

Regards

[Ave]

What's the size of the hard disk? How full is it? If you go Right-Click on My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced tab -> Visual effects ... Settings -> Advanced tab what is the paging file size?

Regards

It's 739 MB

[A_Traveller]

and .. How full? Swap setting please.

One thing to try is to ensure that all internet data has been erased for the PC, e.g.cache, cookies et al. If this isn't done from time to time {or sizes pre-set} then even non internet activities can suffer.

Regards

Edited June 24, 2008 by A_Traveller

[Ave]

I did as you suggested and also been looking for cookies, temp files, temp internet files. Deleted every single thing, the system will still freeze from time to time.

Maybe I just have too many music and picture files and need an external hard drive. Will check at the shop and find out.

Thanks a lot for your help!