Netbook: upgrade or downgrade?

[edenlore]

Hi guys,

I recently purchased an acer aspire 751 netbook, with 2GB RAM, 250GB HD . It came with vista preinstalled. I'm not sure what the processor is, but I think it's a bog-standard netbook processor, nothing special. Anyway, the thing is an absolute nightmare because it is SO VERY SLOW. I suspect vista to be the main problem (and maybe some of the preinstalled virus software etc, but mostly vista...). Some people have told me to upgrade to Win 7, others have said that going to XP is a better idea. I could really do with some advice!

Aside from deciding whether to upgrade or downgrade-- I'm not sure how to approach an OS installation on a machine with no disk drive! So details of how to do that would also be very much appreciated.

Thanks very much,
Ellen

[Allan]

Contrary to what "some people" have told you, the OS makes very little difference. What, in particular, is slow?

[edenlore]

The computer is slow to respond to whatever I do, but particularly stuff like launching a browser (IE etc.) or opening documents. Sometimes it can't keep up when I'm typing and the text takes somewhere between 5-10 seconds to appear.

[Allan]

Okay, two things. First, you should make sure you are malware free. Please do a full scan with BOTH your anti virus utility AND MalwareBytes. Then we can try a clean boot and see what happens.