I love my little ghetto laptop.
I got it for $40.00 shipped from a for sale/trade forum.
It's an
Acer Travelmate 505DX. Granted, not a powerhouse, but it's fantastic for surfing, Turbolink, etc.
The guy I bought it from said he used it in college 2-3 years ago, and it had been sitting and he just wanted to get rid of it. It had no hard drive, and he didn't even know how much memory was in it, he thought it only had the base memory in it, (32MB), well, when I got it and opened it, there was already another 128MB stick in the lone expansion slot, so it came w/~160MB ram already installed. I threw in the HDD from my old P-II Toshiba, formatted it, installed WinXP, and now it rocks. The battery was trash - plan on getting another one on Ebay soon, ~$50.00, and a bigger HDD. It only has a CD-ROM, player) but @ $40.00, I can't complain.
I'm typing this message on it now, I have an old DLink 802.11b WiFi card in it, connected to my $25.00 SMC wireless router.
I pretty much only use it on the porch/patio (Has to be plugged in to work), and usually inly when I come downstairs for a smoke. I like the fact that when I close the lid, it goes into standby in about 5 seconds, shuts off the HDD< and releases the WiFi connection. When I come back down to smoke again, I open the lid, enter my PW, and it's back up and running, connected to the network, in about 5 seconds.
It's missing the tilde key cap, but other than that, it's awesome. I don't care too much for the keyboard, my Toshiba had a much better layout.
As for yours, it shouldn't be slow at all. I would look for Spyware, or a virus. If that doesn't work, it ma be time to wipe it clean and start over again. There's also utilities out there to clock the CPU back with software - although it will still run fast enough to surf, do work, etc.
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