Laptop grinding to a halt - help please!

samhale

Unfortunetly this is my solution for everything.
Back up your files onto USB, Hard Drive or DVD's, than reinstall XP.
It gets rid of all your settings, but all the crap thats slowing your computer down.

vyseyboy

Minerva69 wrote: »

Hi, I'm the other half of the OP He's still having problems with his laptop and it's still very slow, so I'm trying to sort it out for him while he's out. I've been reading about people having problems with AVG 8 - as he's got this installed could it be that which is slowing things down? Should I uninstall it and try Avast instead?

I would try just disabling their linkscanner / search shield first. These two bits of AVG 8 are the most resource hungry when you are browsing. You can still keep full antivirus functionality though.
see here: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/07/12/how-to-disable-avg-search-shield-and-active-surf-shield-linkscanner/

Or you could uninstall AVG and reinstall it with the bloated features removed, as per http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/07/12/setup-and-install-avg-8-without-websearchsurf-shield-firewall-toolbar-and-linkemail-scanner-feature-and-silent-switch/

If that doesn't work, uninstalling AVG and using avast is another option.

Minerva69

Tried disabling the AVG link scanner/search shield but it didn't make any difference. Was about to order some memory from Crucial when we discovered another problem! The laptop now won't shut down properly without pressing the power off button. The USB ports also seem to be not working properly, when a USB flash drive is plugged in it isn't recognised. This also means my hubby can't use his external mouse as it's a wireless one that has to have a dongle plugged into a USB port. It worked for half an hour this morning and then stopped. Should we try re-installing Windows?

Doonhamer

Probably the best thing to do.

But you could try a windows repair first. Go past the first R, it's the second one you want.

PeteHerts

When I used to run XP I found uninstalling IE7 then the system would revert to IE6 then Windows update would reinstall IE7 and this fresh install made the internet faster.

Minerva69

Hi again! We're still having problems with the laptop. I installed 1GB extra memory from Crucial, so it's now got 1.5GB RAM and it's made hardly no difference at all We've run several anti-spyware checks and online anti-virus checks and they all came back with nothing. The only thing I haven't done is repair Windows, as there was no Windows disc with the PC when it came from Dell (they don't supply them apparently). The only thing we can do is reset the laptop to the original factory settings - would this be worth doing? My OH is worried he will lose all his favourites in IE if we do this, is there any way we can back this up first?

Also I noticed yesterday that the laptop's clock is about 10 minutes slow - is the CMOS battery going and would this cause the other problems as well? The USB ports still only work intermittently and sometimes the laptop won't shut down.