to speed up my laptop?

Electro I know that you know lots but so do others.

Many computer tyros would not know the difference between their PC being slow and the WWW responses being slow.

IT IS possible to upgrade a laptop from 802.11g to 803.11n by simply fitting a NIC to it. Many (most that I have seen) Laptops have their WiFi supplied by a mini-PCI card. (As opposed to being built-in to the motherboard.) Even if the laptop does have fixed WiFi, it is still possible to upgrade it with and external NIC card.

T
May 2013

The question was NOT asked in the "Internet connection", so we assumed that it was about the computer been to slow and not a question of connection bandwidth...

Upgrading a laptop wifi is NOT always possible. In many cases, it would mean replacing the motherboard as the wifi hardware is often integrated...

Electro
May 2013

I think that previous answers have missed you point which is about your Broadband speed.

First of all, you don't have a speed of 54Mb/s from BT. That is the speed of your WiFi. If you want better performance, connect the laptop to the BT Home Hub via wired Ethernet.

Alternatively, if the BT Home Hub is a Home Hub 2.0 or Home Hub 3.0, upgrade your laptop's WiFi to 802.11n which will give you up to 130 Mb/s via a HH 2 or 3.

T
May 2013

CCleaner is a marvelous tool to cleanup acumulating junk on your computer. To be run about every 2 to 3 months.

Files clutter slow down the computer by making file access less effecient. It also tend to promote files fragmentation.

Get an external drive and transfert the files that you only rarely use to it. Do the same with those large music and video files. Access speed is not crutial for those, so the slightly slower transfert speed usualy associated with external drives is not a factor. It can free up a LOT of space.

Take a look at the installed applications.
If you find any that you no longer use or need, think about uninstalling them. DON'T touch the drivers and associated applications.

Disable ANY and ALL preloaders and quick starters. NONE are needed, all make your computer slower.

Another very good alternative browser: Firefox.
As Chrome, it's faster and generaly beter than internet explorer.

For both, get the adblock and no-script addons.
They make your browsing faster and safer.

Over time, the files on a hard drive get fragmented.
If you have an SSD, fragmentation is not an isue as there are no moving parts. In this case, skip the following.

If you have a coventional drive, you MUST defragment it regularly, weekly is a good schedule. Some premium defragmenters have some kind of smart, set and forget, scheduling.
Get Defraggler. It a GREAT and free defragmenter that make the included defragmenter look absolutely lame. It will defragment a drive with less than 1% free space, although it will take a LOOOONG time in that case...
If you took some time cleaning file clutter and removen useless applications, the liberated space will make defragmentation much faster.
On a laptop, connect the charger and let it run overnight.

On a conventional hard drive, defragmentation will make your anti-virus (like Malwarebyte) and anti-spyware/junkware (like Spybot) preform their scans much faster. Reducing file clutter will also make the scans faster as there will be less files to scan.

Electro
May 2013

take all uness e mails,music off ,and most important check to see if if ur laptop is automaticly backing up your files,if this is so,back them up to a dongle,or cd,if you allow the comp to back up all the time,your hard drive will crash but not before slowing down

mm
May 2013

Your laptop is running as fast as it did on the day you first used it - any apparent slowness will be because of the amount of work it's doing or because it's waiting for an external event to occur.

Use task manager to see what processes are using up CPU time - just now my CPU is running at between 0% and 30% running just One Internet Browser (Google Chrome).

Speedtest dot Net tells me that my download rate is 10.7Mbps and upload 15.7 - If I connect to my router with a piece of wire I would probably get 25Mbps download but what I have now is plenty fast enough.
I doubt I will ever get the advertised rate of 40Mbps but it doesn't natter - it's not a limiting factor.

If web pages load slowly it's not because of my machine or my internet service (necessarily) - the data comes from far away and is subject to interruption and the volume of traffic - if a page takes an age to load then that's down to external factors. If it's slow on the motorway we do not blame the car.

I find that the browser Google Chrome is blisteringly fast in comparison to Microsoft's Internet Explorer - 37% of people use Chrome - more widely used than any other.

Housekeeping
Over time many rogue entries get into your startup list - software gets loaded or pre-loaded at start time (just in case) - some software might be malicious (mal-ware) sending back information about your browsing habits.

All this stuff in your start-up list will be doing you no good at all. Type msconfig in the run box

Prune your startup list to zero or just a few entries
Install and run the following free software
Ccleaner
Malwarebytes
Spybot
Google Chrome

Now if your machine is still running slowly (appearing to run slowly) consider returning to a Restore Point.

Process Explorer is another piece of free S/W that shows you what's happening in your machine.

You do not mention your operating system.

Your machine is NOT running slowly - it just looks as though it is because it's all gummed up.

Peccavi
May 2013