My laptop is about ten years old. It was given to me about two years ago and it worked perfectly. Recently it’s become troublesome. My friend who fixes it for me when I encounter a problem used to say “it doesn’t have enough memory”. But that can’t be right – it has only 256Mb RAM and about 4Gb free space on each of its two hard drives – very little by todays standards, but that’s AS MUCH AS IT EVER HAD. Now he’s saying “it’s come to the end of its life you need a new one”. Probably he’s right. But I’d like to understand exactly what is happening.
(1) Some softwares that used to open in a fraction of a second now take a couple of minutes (!) to open. Yet, once opened, they react fast (I have no trouble watching a DVD movie, playing a computer game, surfing the net, using PhotoShop, MSWord, etc, ONCE I’VE “GOT IN”)
(2) I now frequently get “the program is not responding”. Or “Firefox [for example] has encountered a problem and needs to close”. Sometimes even File Manager doesn’t respond when I try to close the offending program, and I have to reboot! If I reinstall a software it’s OK for a while and then the trouble comes back.
These symptoms seem paradoxical. My question is theoretical:
(1)The speed of electrons hasn’t changed so how can what used to happen in a fraction of a second now take minutes?
(2) if some hardware or software is “corrupted” how can it work perfectly on some days but not on others?