Help needed with parents slow pc

rdpro

just an addendum, download ccleaner (crap cleaner) if you can. Go into the Tools section, then Startup, and disable any programs that are definitely not required to start with windows (MSN messenger, Adobe, quicktime, iTunes, etc). This will hopefully speed up your pc enough to run the other fixes mentioned above.

Robinhood

Thanks for all the replies to date. I'm back at my parents (can't beat your mums sunday dinner!) and hey presto their pc has sprung back in to life. My dad advises that they've done nothing to it and that it just one day started performing again!! Anyway as I don't know that much about PC's and it is running well now I think I'll leave well alone. Once again, thanks for the help and watch this space in the future!!

[Deleted User]

Robinhood wrote: »

Anyway as I don't know that much about PC's and it is running well now

Exactly the reason why you should follow the above personal advice. While it's here and fresh in your mind I'd definately install CCleaner, uninstall ZoneAlarm, turn on Windows Firewall, install Malwarebytes and install hijackthis.

Robinhood

What is it about my family and computers! Visiting my sister and her laptop is painfully slow. It takes ages to boot up, then takes ages to load the user settings. Once it has done this, it is really slow when surfing the net. Looking at task manager there are 79 processes. Other info:

Physical memory (K)
Total 1046904
Available 251604
System Cache 390104

Kerpel temory (K)
Total 74624
Paged 43188
Nonpaged 31428

Totals
Handles 16646
Threads 676
Processes 78

The laptop is a Dell Inspiron I6400 with a T2250 @ 1.73GHz, 1Gb RAM running XP.

I'm in the process of running Spybot Search & Destroy. After this I am thinking of downloading ccleaner. Is this the right thing to do? Any advice will be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

closed

ccleaner won't speed anything up, but does no harm, post a hijackthis log, and do a malwarbytes full scan and fix anything found, reset IE to defaults under tools, internet options advanced

Robinhood

Spybot is about halfway through, should I leave it finish or do the above?

closed

do them simultaneously, hijackthis log first.

aliEnRIK

closed wrote: »

ccleaner won't speed anything up

I've definitely had speed increases on certain computers after the registry scan

closed

I've never noticed any speed difference with any registry scanner. Taking out a few pointers out of a cached file holding 100's of thousands of entries can't make that much of a difference to overall speed imo, the answer is usually elsewhere.

aliEnRIK

I can only assume they were physically stopping something from running properly