Daughter's sony vaio laptop questions

She's had this laptop for a couple of years now.

She used it when she was living at the dorm in her college, and had fast speed internet there. This computer worked like a dream then.

Now that she's back home and on dial up, this thing is the slowest , most horrid computer LOL. Even off line, it takes forever to get programs up and going. Her computer isn't bogged down, and isn't loaded to the max. She just used it for internet research. and research stuff. And the such.

There is absolutely no using this computer now on dial up here at the house. Windows take at least 3 minutes to even open up.

I've cleaned it up and ran the disk defragmenter which took absolutely all day long. Updated the virus data base and no virus's shown.

But if she took it to school and hooked it up on their fast speed internet it would run just fine.

So this thing gets litterally no internet use at all here at the house and is basically only used when she has photos she wants to print off.

My computer is a gateway laptop with athlon 64 chip and does pretty decent on the internet, though slow I can use 3 to 5 windows opened at the same time. We're use to the internet sluggishness around here, but my computer seems to handle lots more than hers does. And i'm not sure why.

Her processor chip is different than mine, hers is centrino would that in itself make such a big difference on the slowness of her computer?

Even though her computer is a couple years old, it's not been used much , she only lived in the dorm 6 months, and was used every day then. It's practially brand new, and still has alot of ram and harddrive on it.

I just don't understand why the internet is so darned slow on her computer and not mine.


I see no change in internet usage here, we're dial up for quite some time to come, I'd get the internet card from the cell phone place so we could go wireless, but we barely have cell phone activity going on out here and that wouldn't do any good either. I don't feel we could get good wireless internet with hardly no cell phone access.