Advice on cleaning up a laptop please

searchlight123

hi all,
acer aspire 5536
amd turion x2 processor
4gb ram
500gb hard disc (only half full)

this has been a great laptop and served me well since purchase in feb 2010. it is now running a bit slow and i've done all the usual like running malwarebytes and ccleaner etc.
this machine was originally a vista home premium os but soon after purchase i was sent discs from acer to upgrade to windows 7 32 bit which i did. the discs i was sent are a white one labelled 'windows 7 upgrade media' and the other green disc labelled 'acer upgrade dvd'. i have no other windows discs with this laptop (other than recovery discs i made on purchase which were when the machine was still a vista laptop).
is it possible to restore factory settings from these acer upgrade discs back to windows 7 as a fresh install, (don't want to downgrade back to vista).
the laptop is perfectly usable just sometimes a little slow, or should
i leave well alone? i have any documents, music, pictures etc saved/backed up to an external hard drive and i have the original install discs for ms office that i use.
thanks for advice.

Ant555

If you have run malware and ccleaner then I would do the following before doing a reinstall of windows.

Download and run Glary Utilities
Do a 'defrag' on the hard disk.

Ideally a defrag will be performed from a boot disk but for now just run the Disk Defragmenter built into Windows 7.
An easy way to run defrag in Windows 7 is click on the start orb - type defragment and click on Disk Defragmenter.
Select your hard disk and either analyse or defrag.
Analyse will, of course, analyse the disk and report back but you are probably better off just clicking defragment.
Leave the lap top until it finished which could be a few minutes to an hour maybe.

Hope this helps.

With regards to your backups - do you have an email program installed on the lap top or do you use webmail (hotmail/gmail etc)
If its an email program then we need to be careful that you have all the necessary files backed up

searchlight123

Ant555 wrote: »

If you have run malware and ccleaner then I would do the following before doing a reinstall of windows.

Download and run Glary Utilities
Do a 'defrag' on the hard disk.

Ideally a defrag will be performed from a boot disk but for now just run the Disk Defragmenter built into Windows 7.
An easy way to run defrag in Windows 7 is click on the start orb - type defragment and click on Disk Defragmenter.
Select your hard disk and either analyse or defrag.
Analyse will, of course, analyse the disk and report back but you are probably better off just clicking defragment.
Leave the lap top until it finished which could be a few minutes to an hour maybe.

Hope this helps.

With regards to your backups - do you have an email program installed on the lap top or do you use webmail (hotmail/gmail etc)
If its an email program then we need to be careful that you have all the necessary files backed up

thanks for reply.
i am running windows live mail to access my sky/yahoo email account.

GunJack

it depends.... are you running W7 or Vista at the moment? There are issues with trying to do a clean install of W7 with upgrade media. You may be better factory resetting vista then using the upgrade media, you may not. Have a read through this before you embark on the project...

(....and don't forget to back everything up to your external hdd first )

Clean Install Windows 7 with Upgrade Media

searchlight123

GunJack wrote: »

it depends.... are you running W7 or Vista at the moment? There are issues with trying to do a clean install of W7 with upgrade media. You may be better factory resetting vista then using the upgrade media, you may not. Have a read through this before you embark on the project...

(....and don't forget to back everything up to your external hdd first )

Clean Install Windows 7 with Upgrade Media

Hi
Running windows 7 at the moment

closed

post a hijackthis log

when it's slow, find out why by looking in task manager

NiftyDigits

Since you already have a licence to use Windows 7, I can help you with this.
I'll send you a guide via PM.