My daughter has had this laptop for a year and a half. She loves manga and runs lots of graphics programs. It was slowing down on her so we recently purchased another 256mb of RAM and they installed it at the store and in the proper slot order. Unfortunately, instead of being faster it is WAY slower. probably takes 10 minutes to get on the internet. What should we do? My husband thinks defragging will help... Please help, my 13 yr old hates me!

You probably got incompatible RAM. Go here: http://www.crucial.com "So won’t you give this man his wings What a shame To have to beg you to see We’re not all the same What a shame" - Shinedown

Adding RAM should not slow a system down. You really should have gone with more though, especially since she's into graphics...at least another 512MB, preferrably 1GB. Since you said it had been slowing down even before the RAM upgrade & knowing how kid's are, my guess is the system is loaded with all sorts of internet garbage, not to mention spyware, crapware & numerous programs that load when the system 1st boots up (quicktime, itunes, aol/yahoo messengers, camera software, printer software, etc). Have you scanned for viruses & spyware? Do you ever dump the internet garbage files or empty the temp folders? Start by installing a program called CCleaner...here's the link: http://www.filehippo.com/download_c... When you install it, make sure to uncheck the box next to Yahoo toolbar...do NOT allow it to install. Most toolbars (Yahoo & Google for example) are spy programs so if you have them already installed, remove them. When you start CCleaner for the 1st time, I suggest you uncheck the box next to "empty recycle bin" (you can do that manually when necessary), then Run Cleaner. If you don't have an anti-spyware program, try SuperAntiSpyware: http://www.filehippo.com/download_s... You should also run MSCONFIG to disable some of the programs that load at startup...this will explain: http://www.netsquirrel.com/msconfig... I also recommend disabling search indexing: http://lifehacker.com/software/opti... After doing all the above, THEN you can defrag.