The ageing process As Lenny the laptop starts to slow down after reaching the ripe old age of three,

IT’S JUST THREE months since I wished my Lenovo IdeaPad a happy birthday. In laptop years, the trusty IdeaPad is probably already over the hill.

This observation is based on some simple maths. I change my laptop about every three years, provided Microsoft’s updates don’t kill it first. Humans in the UK live on average 81.5 years; extrapolating that to the laptop’s average lifespan puts it in its mid-thirties. That doesn’t sound so bad, were it not for the fact that on a recent Match of the Day, Messrs Lineker and Shearer were discussing the performance of one well-regarded footballer and saying that, at the age of 34, he wouldn’t last much longer.

That would explain why Lenny the Lenovo has been on a go-slow: it’s all down to age. By the way, anthropomorphising the computer in this way is easier than constantly giving the model number – I’m not really into giving objects pet names.

I gave ‘him’ a medical check to make sure the cause wasn’t anything obvious. Hard disk fragmented – negative. All four CPU cores maxed out? Negative. Running out of memory?

Possibly. The IdeaPad comes with 8GB which, you’d think, should be enough for anything. Firing up Task Manager showed there was 2GB free which you’d think would be plenty but, on being told that figure, Keef and Garry went through a teeth-sucking routine worthy of a professional plumber. But here’s a thing. Windows Task Manager says I’m using 75% of the available memory, and lists every running process and the memory each is using. If I add up all the memory being used, the total is less than 1GB, leaving 5GB mysteriously unavailable. Then there’s the other 2GB that Task Manager says I’m not using, so how can I be short of RAM?

For a detailed, though not entirely illuminating, discussion on the topic, see tinyurl.com/ udevmem. Some comments suggest Windows is using the ‘spare’ memory for caching, but sometimes doesn’t release cached memory when it should. If this is true, it would explain why memory usage goes straight to 6GB even after a restart and with no applications running

CALL A MECHANIC

While considering this, I received an email from Serif, whose stuff I’ve used for years. The email was offering a great deal on a suite of utilities called System Mechanic Pro (SMP) for the measly sum of £23. SMP promised to speed up my computer by a variety of means, including cleaning up the Registry and, on the fly, optimising memory management, disk writes and CPU usage. What’s to lose? Especially as Serif offers a no-questions-asked 30-day money-back guarantee.

SMP turned up on a DVD by old-fashioned snail mail, and the packaging revealed it had been developed not by Serif but by an outfit called Iolo. Installation was easy and SMP immediately set about analysing the system. It got rid of 100GB of disk rubbish and offered to tweak the internet settings to improve speed. It also backed up then cleaned and defragged the Registry.

So far, so good. SMP also comes with its own anti-malware features. This turned out to be not so good, at least from a performance point of view. System speed was worse than when Lenny was running the pre-installed McAfee software, which I’d uninstalled after two weeks of frustration. So the anti-malware was disabled and I reverted to Defender, which resulted in a partial improvement.

SMP comes with real-time monitoring and optimisation features. One aims to improve memory usage, while another manages disk writes in a way that prevents fragmentation, as well as timing the writing process to occur when the impact on system speed will be lowest. In desperation I turned those features off too. Guess what? With the speed optimisations off everything ran much more quickly. That rather defeats the purpose of the program, so I asked Serif for a refund. True to its word, Serif made a prompt and full refund to my credit card.

PAGE TURNER

Following up on the ‘memory use doesn’t tally’ problem, several forum posts indicated this could be down to problems with the pagefile(s) not being cleared properly of old entries. I followed the instructions at tinyurl.com/ udevpagefile to force clearing these out on a full restart and then rebooted, hoping to see a fall in memory use. The shutdown took a full 10 minutes and, on restarting, I went straight into Task Manager, which duly reported memory use of 70%. With no applications running! Back to the drawing board, then

On a more cheerful note, the swap from the BlackBerry to the Samsung Galaxy A3 (Under Development, Shopper 335) has gone well. The new phone has been anthropomorphised to ‘Sammy’, and I can vouch that it fully lives up to the five-star rating given in Shopper 331.

Sadly I think the lifecycle of a smartphone is even shorter than it is for laptops. In phone years Sammy’s already a teenager and, by the time you read this, will be heading for 30. At that rate it won’t be long before he’s joining me getting email adverts for care homes and funeral plans. Life is short – don’t waste it!