Windows 7: Laptop is lagging?

Hey I have a Dell Inspiron 1564 on Windows 7 home premium 64 bit.

I noticed about a month ago my laptop would start to lag when i had the most basic programmes open. I would be watching a film on my laptop and playing a game or browsing the internet and suddenly the sound would start crackling; the video would go into slow motion and my whole laptop would freeze up. The only way i could get rid of this was to restart my laptop which took about 10minutes just to switch off when its lagging.



I finally had enough of this so I restored it to when I first bought it from Dell (in july). I tried to not install so many programmes as I thought this might help. This is what I installed:

Steam
Sims 3 + expansions
Puzzle pirates
Left 4 dead 2
Google chrome
DivX player
Norton anti virus 2010

But a day into using my laptop after the restore; it decides to lag again! Im getting really fed up as I dont know what to do, I thought the restore would help but it hasnt and now I have no clue what to do.

I was installing microsoft word yesterday, I had no other programmes open and my CPU was at 100% and then my laptop just switched off, if anyone has any suggestions that will very helpful. Thanks

There's going to be a few people that are going to act like kids and go straight to Norton as your problem. Take them with a grain of salt. 2009 and newer versions of Norton products are much easier on your machine and work very well in comparison to their older counterparts. Given that I've used Norton NIS since 2009, all of 2010, and now i have 2011 I'm still without complaint.

Now that that's out of the way...

QUESTION: At first glance it sounds like your RAM in your laptop isn't playing nice. When you said it started happening after a day, had you gotten around to playing your games yet like normal or were you still in the rebuilding phase?

Head on over to Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool and download one of the ISOs and burn it to a CD. You should be able to do so within Windows using the built in disc image burner.

Reboot into that CD and give it a run for AT LEAST 5 times or overnight. Overnight is recommended because a) you're sleeping, why not kill two birds blah blah, and b) it can possibly run longer. Given the random nature of RAM, 5 times may not cut it.

QUESTION: Have you had any write errors either when installing Windows or with other programs? If so, it wouldn't hurt to open a command line window and run "chkdsk /r". It will require a restart because it can't run when Windows is if it finds bad sectors on your drive.

NOTE: Can you also provide the manufacturer/model of your laptop for reference?

Thanks!

Hey thanks for the reply, yea someone said that to me on another forum but I dont really wanna uninstall norton as my dad just bought it so it would be a waste of money and also the lag started before i had norton on there.

The first time I lagged when i restored my system I was watching a film and playing puzzle pirates (the game normally runs fine on my computer and the graphics arent that great anyway so i dont see how it would slow my laptop down) I hadn't installed Sims 3 yet as i thought maybe that was the reason why my laptop was so slow because it takes up alot of space.

I installed sims last night, tried to play it and it got really laggy, the sound was crackly again and it took 15minutes just to load a game with lag.

Ok thanks I will give that a try tonight, oh by the way would it be possible to put it on an external hard drive and run it from there? as i dont have any cd's and will only be able to get some once the shops are open after christmas.

And no I havent had any errors, the only thing i can think of (which isnt really an error) my laptop had to do an update so i restarted the laptop and then i tried to watch some stuff through windows media player..the laptop just switched off by itself and when i logged on again i had to set up windows media player again

You could give it a shot. You could also (extract the contents of the ISO) and put it on a USB flash drive if you have one of those.

I've never tried to use Memtest on an external HDD. Mine is in a USB stick as a part of a 20-image toolset I have on a 16gb flash drive. It's worth a short. Just make sure you extract the contents of the ISO (7-Zip is a good tool to do so, 7-Zip).

Some tips on troubleshooting issues such as this: Computer lags every couple seconds