I what ways can I upgrade my ASUS UL30A laptop?

[Rich_B]

Hi

As above, my laptop is agonizingly slow. I'd like to upgrade the RAM, HDD to an SSD and the CPU if possible. It currently has 4GB RAM.

Can somebody please tell me if any or all of the above are possible?

Many thanks

Rich

[parsec]

Re: I what ways can I upgrade my ASUS UL30A laptop?

That PC is an early ultra-book style PC from 2009 originally.

CPU upgrade: No, impossible, it is soldered in place and not replaceable.

RAM upgrade: Yes, it will take up to 8GB of RAM. You can check your memory usage in Windows and see if you are using all 4GB now. That would account for the slowness, as the Windows pagefile is being used in place of memory.

SSD upgrade: A standard SSD will fit, but I can't find any pictures of the bottom to check if the drive is accessible and can be changed.

Part of the slow performance might be many programs that run automatically at startup, or you need to defragement the HDD.

[jaggerwild]

Re: I what ways can I upgrade my ASUS UL30A laptop?

Yeah a memory double will help as well as shutting off clutter on start up, you have to either match the memory you have or buy all new.

[Rich_B]

Re: I what ways can I upgrade my ASUS UL30A laptop?

Thank you very much for your responses. Could you please tell me how to go about shutting down all the unnecessary startup programs?

Thank you

[parsec]

Re: I what ways can I upgrade my ASUS UL30A laptop?

There are multiple ways to do that depending on what OS you use.

But a simple tool that works with all Windows products is CCleaner. You can download the free version here:

https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

This program will install CCleaner on your PC. When the installer is running, it "offers" to install at least one other program you may not want, just be sure to uncheck it before clicking next. It has several options to help speed up a PC, but I'll describe the start up option first.

With CCleaner running, find the Tools option on the left, click that and locate the Startup button, click on that. You'll see a list of programs that run when the PC is booted.

There are two options to stop a program from running, Disable and Delete. Always use the Disable option in case you decide you need a program to run when the PC starts. You can then use the Enable option to turn it on again.

To Disable a program, click on an entry to highlight it, and then click the Disable button. The entry will remain in the list but will have "No" next to it in the Enabled column.

Notice that the main option that is shown is Windows, there are others like Internet Explorer, etc. Clicking those will reveal startup programs just for those programs. If you don't understand what an entry is, don't disable it. If you do disable something and then later discover something you use is not working, remember you disabled it.

The main screen that appears when CCleaner starts is Cleaner, which finds old, worthless files left over from various things. Click the Analyze button on the bottom to see how much disk space is being wasted. You can remove any entries from being deleted if you want to keep them. Otherwise click the Run Cleaner button on the bottom right to remove the worthless files.

But before you run Cleaner, if you have saved login and passwords from any forums or other websites, they are stored in Cookies on your PC. In the Options section, there is a Cookies entry. That allows you to save Cookies from the websites that you have saved Login IDs and Passwords. To save those entries, you just click on them to drag and drop them to the right side, which is the Cookies to keep area.

There are many other options in CCleaner for you to explore, but I'm not writing a user guide here today.

[Rich_B]

Re: I what ways can I upgrade my ASUS UL30A laptop?

I'll give that a go. Thanks for the great advice.

[valeron]

Re: I what ways can I upgrade my ASUS UL30A laptop?

If you want to upgrade your comp it's better to buy everything new in case all the pices shoul suit your motherboard.

[slims875]

Re: In what ways can I upgrade my ASUS UL30A laptop?

Hi

As above, my laptop is agonizingly slow.

Hello - I have a UL30A too and it's as quick as the day I got it in 2010. A few questions.....

1. Of the 465GB available how much free space do you have?
2. When you say slow do you mean opening windows, performing tasks, etc or are you referring to internet download/uploads?
3. Have you ever tweaked services.msc? You are probably running a bunch of services that inherrently slow any system down and are probably never used, such as Windows Search. Disabling a bunch of services that you never use would help.

Some great advice has already been posted, such as downloading and installing CCleaner. It's a multi-function program that when used correctly will rid your system of garbage as well as tweaking the Startup items. Before you delete anything be sure to run Analyze first to be certain the items identified you truly want to get rid of.
You could have as many as 15-20 items loading during Startup, whereas on my system I have four (4). Could you capture your startup items and post them?

Upgrading RAM is always a good thing but you could also not yield its greatest benefit if your system is full of "stuff" that's just taking up space. Everybody has their own preference when it comes to a Defrag program and for me it's Auslogic Disk Defrag that I have set to run 1/week.

Other programs that I would recommend installing are CPU-Z and Process Explorer. CPU-Z can help identify a potential problem with your CPU and Process Explorer can visually let you see what programs are eating all of your resources. These are just personal preferences.