Well a good start would be to ask David (Zonker on glocals) to have a look at your computer, he would be able to advise you what to do.

You can get a reasonable new laptop PC for around 500 CHF in the big stores like mediamarkt or interdiscount.

@nicolas thanks for the mention.

@yfat there is a place in Lausanne called notebook.ch, which obviously specializes in notebook issues. They used to have a store in Geneva, but it was closed a year ago. I don't know off-hand of any other such places close by.

good luck!

Hi Zonker/David,

My son has problem with his computer. It makes huge noise and when he turns it off it is such a release, believe me. My son plays on-line games like WoW, Call of duty and lately the computer is so slow that he cannot properly play. He tried to download some games but it had been taking hours and hours. We are checking for viruses and spies and cleaning it regularly.

What do you think the problem is? My son says it is because of hard drive small capacity and we need to buy a new computer.

If we opt for purchasing one, are there laptops with big capacities to play those mentioned online games?

Thank you in advance.

Sab, I think it's overheating.  Open the lid and look for dust caked around the fans.

@richardm my thoughts, exactly.

@sab I was away from the computer all day and since glocals is unusable on mobile devices (is anyone listening? echo echo echo echo), I saw your message but was unable to respond until now.

While it's possible, even probable, that there is a dust issue and overheating, it is also quite likely that during the time your son has had the computer he has downloaded and installed, uninstalled and generally mucked around with his computer, and probably not in the most careful way. Not that he's deliberately gotten viruses or the like - there are plenty of what I call "gremlins" that can get into your computer and make the processor just churn and churn, which causes the fan to turn forever.

I doubt very much that it's the hard disk. It might be full, but that has little/no effect on the processor working overtime. If the *memory* is not enough, that could be a problem, but easily resolved.

Send me a PM with your phone number/email address and we can talk about this and see what can be done.

If it's really overheating that stays after cleaning, it might also be useful to get the heatsink off and put new thermal paste on. Don't do unless you are confident about not breaking the thing (easier with intel cpus usually, or at least used to be that way when the amds weren't protected, i.e. the die was pretty much open under the heatsink).

If you do, be careful not to get the heatsink on crooked. Use as little thermal paste as possible, as much as needed.

About a year and half ago I moved to a mac, keeping my pc.  At first I hated the mac because I couldn't understand anything at all, and its not like a pc at all.  The mac quickly became my choice machine.  It always starts quickly.  It never churns.  It never slows down.  It never crashes.  I don't need any anti-virus product hogging my resources.  I never run out of memory space.  It never runs slow. 

I hate it when I go back to my buggy slow to react pc where you get bombarded by messages from M$oft to update this or that and then to send them the stupid crash reports which just pop up more windows saying it's all your fault because your hardware's f**ked or that you installed a virus, blah blah.

You can try removing your hard drive, (to keep your data safe), installing a brand new larger drive, and re-installing windows from scratch with all the updates and service packs.  That's what I did and my pc ran faster for about a day, but then the gremlins found their way back in and I am back to a snails pace on my formerly state of the art pc.  God help you if you installed an anti-virus package.  I will probably hog your resources.  God help you if you dont have an anti - virus.  On a PC you cant win.

I say, go for MacBook or its sister computers. I bought mine here in Geneva and am very happy to have it! Really, the best item in the world is Mac! =)

People, the kid wants to game, not photoshop and surf.

Mac ain't no game machine, that much is for sure. Different needs, different setups are "the best".

My Windows 7 machine has been running like a charme. For more than a year.

thanks Robin L, but sounds too complicated to me:)