my device is slow and lags and locks up

[obie67]

Wanted to know if anybody has this notebook.. If it is slow and lags and locks up.. Cant multi task on anything..  Ive hardly used my notebook.. Waited to get wifi and then bought the McAfee livesafe that came installed but was expired.. This notebook take forever to start up.. To load a program.. Ive used the hp support and updated and checked and its up to date and no issues found.. My old cp with windows xp with 128 mb of ram was faster.. This thing is totally a waste of money and time.. It even seems to be running 2 hp support assistant that are different.. 

[WAWood]

@obie67 

You're comparing apples to oranges!  Windows XP could run OK in 1GB of RAM and really well with 2GB of RAM!  I had an XP tablet PC with only 2GB or RAM and I only had to update the RAM to 4GB when I updated the OS to Windows 7.  It even worked OK with 2GB of RAM in Vista!

Windows 10 needs a MINIMUM of 4GB of RAM to even work -- and that is all you have.  Also, you have a Pentium processor and the slowest hard drive on the market.  So yes, performance is going to suffer.

[obie67]

Thank you for that info.. I guess you get what you pay for.. Little over 300.00 dollars is not a lot.. But truly disappointed in this notebook. Why dont they tell you its the minimal amount of ram to run windows 10.  I wasnt buying it to upgrade it to perform like the tag read.. " Dependable performance "..  As for apples to oranges i just could work on my old cp or play games and basically the operating system was user friendly.. Didnt take a computer expert to navigate through problems and fixes.. Never had the lagging issues or ran as slow as this.. its like the newer devices you expect them to perform better. Low end models or not.. So do you have any ideas on how i can improve ths notebook? Upgrade the ram ? Dont know if anything else can be addressed..like the processer or hard drive.. If not then im just gong to use it as a paper weight. Lol thanks again for the info.

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@obie67 

OK, reasonable questions ...

The best performance improvement you can do for a laptop is replace the really slow HDD with a SATA SSD.  They are the same physical size with the same connectors, so you can simply swap one for the other.  The only hard part is CLONING the existing installation from the HDD to the SDD, for which these are the steps:

1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR) from here: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree
2) Connect the new drive to the PC using a USB-to-SSD drive adapter (like the one illustrated below)
3) Follow the instructions in this link: http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Cloning+a+disk
4) Shutdown the PC when done
5) Swap the drives and reboot the PC.

NOTE: To do this easily, the SDD has to be the same capacity as the HDD.  IF you get an SDD that is a lot smaller, then before you do the cloning, you have to shrink the largest partition on the HDD (usually the OS partition), to the size such that it, and the other partitions, fit easily on the SSD.

I think your model has a 500GB HDD, so the same size SATA SSD will run around $50 USD -- not a lot of money for really major performance gain.

The second improvement is RAM.  While Windows 10 will run in 4GB, if you have 8GB, you will see performance gain.  I think you're looking at around the same cost for that.

If you're not used to replacing internal parts in laptops, then I suggest you hunt down a local laptop repair place to do this for you.

And while you could contact HP service to see if they will do this, my guess is they will not -- as they do not do upgrades.  But you can use the info below to contact a service center and find out:  

Since you live in the U.S., here is a link to the HP Service Repair Centers:
https://www.service-center-locator.com/hp-hewlett-packard/hp-hewlett-packard-service-center.htm

If that link does not provide you sufficient information, then use the main HP link:
https://support.hp.com/us-en/contact-hp?openCLC=true

I've found those links to be unreliable if you're using Win10 and the new Edge Browser; so if you are, you need to use something else, like FireFox.

Good Luck