I ll list my computer details at the bottom. I'm running Windows 7. My computer used to run fairly well. When I first bought it I could run minecraft, chrome, and Office at the same time with no problem.
In the last month or so (I've been using it only two days a week lately) I have noticed it's been very slow. So I looked at my resource manager. I have 4 gigs of ram on this machine, which is what it came with. Out of that four gigs of ram, 2.3 gigs is used up by "Hardware Reserved" and a couple hundred megabytes is in standby. This leaves me with 1.7 or so "free" ram, but nearly all of that is used up just idling.
I've googled the issue and can't seem to find a fix. I've even gone so far as to do a full factory reset, and it hasn't improved (and now I'm dealing with a background windows update that I can't stop on top of it).
What can I do to fix this issue?
Laptop details:
3 or 4 year old Acer Aspire 5250
AMD E-450 APU with Radeon HD Graphics 1.65 GHz
4 GB Ram
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Added (1). To be clear: I have not added any hardware whatsoever other than mice the entire time I've owned it. Furthermore, I've seen online people running similar setups with a tenth the allotted "hardware reserved" ram.