Can I speed up my tablet PC?

A user's Archos tablet is not living up to expectations - but unfortunately there aren't many ways to make it better

We have recently purchased an Archos 9 tablet PC with Windows 7 in order to play movies for our son while on long journeys and also to browse the Internet. The problem is that it is so slow and the touch screen is not as intuitive as you would expect but I guess that’s not something we can do much about. I have tried to switch off many of the unused programs but this has not helped much and I wondered if we could increase the 1Gb of memory or indeed if there was something else I could be doing to improve performance.

Daniel Crabtree, by email

Yet another warning of the dangers of being an early adopter. It always pays to wait a while and read the reviews and this model has been widely criticised for its sluggish performance and touch screen. The problem with this and several other Windows tablets is a slow processor, and upgrading the memory – even if it were possible, which it isn’t – wouldn’t make much difference. By the way, this model isn’t alone in that respect, and something else to bear in mind with most tablet PCs is that there’s no easy or cheap way for the user to replace the battery when they inevitably run out of puff three or four years down the line.