RAM issue

[Gustavo Woltmann]

My laptop became a little slow from last 3-4 months. My friend had a spare 4gb ram. So i took his spare one and put in my laptop. My laptop had already a 4gb ram. But after putting 4+4=8gb i found no change on my laptop. It is as slow as it was before.

What should I do now?

[KnightRid]

Make sure the 8gb of ram is actually showing up and if it is, consider getting a SSD.

[sbohdan]

If it slowed down in the last few months, than it is not the RAM. You need to do some cleanup on the computer because windows and the browsers get cluttered by a lot of garbage. Also, you need to disable all unnecessary apps running in the background, that got there by installing them on your computer since.

[blaxkassassin]

Ensure that the computer read the additional memory installed. If it does then clean the entire computer.....browser history, delete or back up files, remove programs you not using. If this still doesn't work....backup all your files then do a factory reset.

[Gustavo Woltmann]

Make sure the 8gb of ram is actually showing up and if it is, consider getting a SSD.

Yeah, it's showing but I don't want to spend on a SSD

[KnightRid]

Make sure the 8gb of ram is actually showing up and if it is, consider getting a SSD.

Yeah, it's showing but I don't want to spend on a SSD

Only thing I can suggest is to start fresh. BACKUP YOUR DATA (pictures, music, movies, documents, favorites, etc that you dont have stored online already) then Wipe it and reinstall windows (your laptop probably has a recovery partition that will let you reset it to like the day you bought it). You will have to redownload all updates and programs you want reinstalled.

you never told us what model laptop you have, what cpu, what programs you are running, if it is slow on the main windows screen with nothing running or if certain programs slow it down, is it just slow in your browser (if so then it is your internet or you can clear your browser cache and try again), is it overheating, is the hard drive full....

Ok I had one other thought, run malwarebytes (its free) and see what it finds and get rid of the crap....

[Gustavo Woltmann]

Make sure the 8gb of ram is actually showing up and if it is, consider getting a SSD.

Yeah, it's showing but I don't want to spend on a SSD

Only thing I can suggest is to start fresh. BACKUP YOUR DATA (pictures, music, movies, documents, favorites, etc that you dont have stored online already) then Wipe it and reinstall windows (your laptop probably has a recovery partition that will let you reset it to like the day you bought it). You will have to redownload all updates and programs you want reinstalled.

you never told us what model laptop you have, what cpu, what programs you are running, if it is slow on the main windows screen with nothing running or if certain programs slow it down, is it just slow in your browser (if so then it is your internet or you can clear your browser cache and try again), is it overheating, is the hard drive full....

Ok I had one other thought, run malwarebytes (its free) and see what it finds and get rid of the crap....

It's a Dell Latitude E6430, Win 8.1. I don't run heavy programs or a lot of programs at a time. I used to play games before but, since it becomes slow, I don't play games now. The browser is slow too.

[KnightRid]

Ok then I would suggest to try the malwarebytes first and see how that works.

OH - you could also try ccleaner and try to fix the registry with that and see how it goes. Just be warned, if there are a lot of errors you could corrupt the registry and not be able to start windows so make sure you have a restore point or better yet, a complete backup you can restore.

Windows will slow down over time due to the stupid registry and I have had to format and reinstall if the above didnt work.