Another laptop help question

[cardiff_gareth]

So I have my new hard drive in the laptop and everything is now reinstalled like before but I'm having issues with laptop speed as it seems to be running slower

I opened 96 RAW files in Lightroom from the K20 and I knew it would run slow but it did something it's never done before, it rather rapidly shut the laptop down. It restarted all fine but then when I opened up Lightroom and just tried exporting images it said it didn't have enough memory? I opened task manager and I saw Lightroom was using 1.5gb if memory and my RAM memory is only 2gb. I tried again and once more it said there wasn't enough memory. Before, using the old hard drive it would run slow but it would run never the less and never shut the pc down or tell me there wasn't enough memory and what's weird is now I have a much larger hard drive so a lot more free space and all the junk wasn't installed on this so if anything it should run faster? It's actually running slower in general regardless of what I tell it to do, it was a clean install and it has Kaspersky on it and no malware?

Should I plug the external drive in and tell Lightroom to use that as a scratch disk? What is a scratch disk anyway, is it like RAM to help it run multiple tasks and speed things up? Also why is the new better hard drive making the system run slower? I didn't install any drivers for the hard drive, just plug and played - should I have searched for a driver? The new hard drive is a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 320gb sata

 

[blazzar]

There is a chance you have installed a drive that was a slower speed than your original (ie 5400 rpm vs 7200 rpm) and it is keeping the pics in RAM for too long due to the read/write taking longer.

Try and export the discs to your external drive (if you aren't doing that already) as that may be an issue.

Failing that see if you can get some additional ram for your machine, pop your make and model on the Crucial site http://www.crucial.com/uk/index.aspx and that will tell you what you can buy.