A friend gave me a laptop that he only used briefly a few years ago. I installed XP on it, and it does connect to my WIFI network, and I can use it to give commands to the printer. Originally the thing was running on Win 2000.

The laptop is old, but it doesn't really date back to the stone age. The hard disk has 14 GB of which only 4 GB is used.

The thing is maddeningly slow though. I did everything I could do: defragging, cleaning up the hard disk, and I uninstalled unnecessary programs. Also I restricted the programs that automatically fire up when starting windows to a bare minimum.

Do you have any suggestions what I could do to make the thing move faster?

On another note, thinking that maybe a limited RAM could be the problem, I decided to rum the MemTest that comes with XP.

It has been running for over one hour now, and the screen reads 28100% coverage, 0 errors.

maybe you need to get more RAM? if the HDD is only 14Mb, then i suspect that there is only a small amount of RAM.

How much RAM? What's the processor speed? Was it okay (i.e. not slow) when it was running Win2K? If so, it probably can't handle WinXP...

Seconded. Forget about the memtest, check how much RAM is in the computer, and check whether you can reasonably upgrade it. Win XP will get reasonable at 256MB, and fast at 1GB. Here's a table for you, my personal experience with WinXP:

128MB - ridiculous

256MB - works but don't open more than 1 program at a time

512MB - no notable improvement over 256. I don't know why, just my observation

768MB - fast

1GB - fast

2GB - fast

The problem with an old laptop is that it might be difficult or impossible to find the correct RAM parts that go in there. They change them every year, and nobody really stocks old ones. So additional RAM will certainly be much more expensive than modern RAM, or you may not even be able to find it. Windows 2000 +14GB HD means that thing is ancient in computer years.

On the keyboard, press the Flying Windows key together with the Pause Break key. The information we need is under System and Computer.

You will almost certainly need SDRAM Not too expensive as you can see.