Repairing a laptop and saving my music on there

Model? Operating system? Memory? Disk space? What precisely is slow and how slow is it?

Back up songs to an external drive via USB

Clear cookies & temporary files. CCleaner is good for this
https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

Consider de-fragmenting your hard drive

USB external disk drive
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_nr_n_5?fst=as%3Aoff&rh=n%3A340831031%2Cn%3A430544031%2Ck%3Ausb+disk+drives&keywords=usb+disk+drives&ie=UTF8&qid=1420469710&rnid=340832031

Cheers, gents. It's a Compaq Presario (CQ61). I don't know how to find out the other info. It's about four or five years old. It's never been used for work - just for iTunes and General tinternet use. I've never downloaded a film on to it, so it's not like it's been hammered.

It's so slow that it makes doing anything with it impossible. For instance, I just turned it on and was able to put in the password within a couple of seconds. I then shut the lid, opened it, and it took two minutes for the screen to light up again. The hard drive light is on almost constantly. It also struggles to connect to the Internet.

Sounds familiar, what's it's chatname on here?

You might as well back things up and reformat the disc

The clue may be the hard drive light. Maybe the disk is on its way out, or possibly you have some process that runs on startup and hammers the disk -- perhaps for well-intentioned reasons like an AV scan, or perhaps for evil purposes.

So what happens if you wait for 10 minutes or however long it takes for the hard drive usage to drop? Is performance OK after that?

And what happens if you don't close the lid after entering the password?

Or if you disconnect it from the internet?

Annoyingly, on this iPad i can't see the entire post cos of the long link in an earlier post! But I get the gist.

I'd not turned on the laptop for several months before today. Now, as happened then,
my anti-virus program (AVG) says there are "several threats" which it says it is removing (slowly).

There could be viruses on it, but it was unusable long before AVG started flagging up possible
problems, which is why I got the iPad.

The music on the laptop is about 120 CDs (I've not downloaded anything). Would I be better off
resetting factory settings (or whatever it's called), starting from scratch and just putting the music
back on to the laptop? There's nothing else on there that I need to keep.

that's what I'd do and just save the songs to a flash drive if you have one

I don't know what a flash drive is - let alone have one!

It's one of those thumb sized drives that plugs into a USB port. They can store up to at least 32 Gb
http://www.amazon.co.uk/b?node=514275031

In windows explorer, right click on the folder that your music is stored in and select properties. It'll tell you how much space they take up.

Cheers. It says, "Size of files in library: 25.1GB."

Another thing to do is msconfig. You can stop various things starting on startup and this would help your laptop run quicker

http://www.optimizingpc.com/optimize/msconfig.html
http://www.netsquirrel.com/msconfig/

Thanks. It's gonna take a while for AVG to do its thing, so I'm going to the gym and I'll be back in about an hour
to try a few of these things. Thanks again.

If you click on start and computer or my computer in windows explorer, it's should tell you how much of your hard drive (c: disk) is free

Local disk: 191GB free of 285GB.

Recovery: 2.08GB free of 12.4GB.

I would not format it and start again after backing up your music. I'd say clearing temp files and cookies, stopping some processes in msconfig and maybe defragmenting your hard drive should improve things a lot. If you do the msconfig thing, be careful and have a search & read about what you need to leave running. There is normally some obvious stuff you can stop.
If you did format the hard drive and re-install everything, that would take far longer imo.

Download & install spybot(free) and it will probably help also. It does take a while to run, but it will locate stuff to remove and remove it for you.

http://www.safer-networking.org/

Cheers, mate. I've got something called "Windows CleanUp!" which deletes files, but I'll check out what you suggested.

Any idea why the iTunes on my laptop would refuse to recognise my brand new iPod?

Try these

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6610010

http://support.apple.com/en-gb/TS1538

Cheers, mate. Really appreciate your help.

apple in news today - they have been rebuked for just providing enough memory to house their operating systems on all their devices. leaving very little space for your own files.