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We purchased a netbook for my wife who uses it mostly for web browsing and some light word processing. We added another gig of RAM for a total of 2GB. However, it is still slow in the sense that often it takes awhile for keyboard commands to register. Any tips for speeding up the netbook or any thoughts on why it is still slow (i.e., is is really just the speed of the Atom processor)?

This is a Samsung NF310-A01 that runs Windows 7 Basic. It has an Intel Atom N550 Dual-Core porcessor (1.5 GHz). We added a gig of ram.

My wife mostly just runs Chrome and Microsoft Word. We have Avast installed for our anti-virus and Dropbox is generally running the background.

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This is a bad question! You haven't told us exactly which netbook that is and it's exact processor, what programs you're running, which operating system you're using etc, so we can't provide an answer. In general, it's not Atom, because I've got a netbook with a certain Atom processor that runs Office 2010 and Windows 7 64bit plus some extra bloatware fine. – AndrejaKo Sep 13 '11 at 21:24
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Not so much "bad" as lacking additional detail needed to fully answer the question. – Dave M Sep 13 '11 at 21:25
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3 Answers

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One thing to check is a virus scanner that is running and checking files. Also any other un-needed background task. Skype is one that can really suck resourses. If you are comfortable stopping some of these and seeing the results, you may find an app/service giving you the lag you experience. If you post your OS info, more help may be forthcoming around easy ways to disable servcies.

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So are you comfortable disabling servcies/apps using msconfig in Windows 7 or do you require detailed steps? – Dave M Sep 14 '11 at 14:34
Thanks. Yes I am comfortable disable services/apps. I now fear it may be chrome and I just installed a flash block extension to see if that helps. – mike Sep 14 '11 at 19:30
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So far, installing a flash block extension in chrome has helped the most. Never realized what a resource hog flash can be.

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Another thing to look at is how many tabs do you have open on Chrome. For example, while I can open 250 tabs on Firefox before a noticable lag, I'll only get to about 50 tabs with Chrome. An extreme example, but it is something to look at.

A side effect of Chrome's sandboxing is that each process eats up more resources.

Another thing to check is extensions. All extensions will run under one process.

You also want to notice what you are doing at that time of the noticable lag.

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