Home computer nightmare.

[Globalti]

I'm sure this is a common enough scenario. Three of us share the home computer, which runs Windows XP Home edition. The nipper spends hours on Club Penguin and looking at You Tube videos. It's getting slower and slower to boot up and more and more cantankerous, it won't run Orange webmail and a couple of other applications just hang. Today I'm going to give it a good early spring clean in the hope that I can remove whatever conflicts are causing the problems.

I plan to clear out the temporary internet files folder and history and everything I can think of, including removing and re-loading stuff like Quick Time, Real Player etc. Then run Ccleaner, which our IT bloke at work recommends. Then I might even remove Internet Explorer and re-load this. Then do a disc defragmentation. Also run an AVG virus check.

Question: Is there any particular order in which I should do these things?

Another question: If I do this on my own part of Home Edition, will it also do the other two users or do I need to treat them separately?

Final question: Anything else I should do?

Thanks!

 

[ASC1951]

I would run the virus sweep first. I gave up with AVG, which I found far too slow and creaky and am very pleased with Kaspersky. IIRC they have a Christmas offer at about £20 a year.

[Do you use Outlook? The default setting for Journal used to be that it was turned on, so it automatically kept a copy of every Outlook and MS Office document you created and you ended up wading in treacle. They may have fixed that, but check.]

 

[ACW]

do a back-up and create a restore point first, then if things go wrong you can go back to the start and try again

 

[swee'pea99]

Hi

Download & run Advanced Systemcare and Spybot, then go to use Crucial's scanning tool to find out how much it would cost to upgrade your RAM.

Slightly more techily, you might also find it worth doing Start > Run > (type in) msconfig then checkout the startup tab and see what starts itself up when you reboot. Untick everything you don't recognise/need (you can always come back and retick if anything goes pear-shaped).

I would stress I'm no tech-head, but I've had your problems, and these solutions have worked for me.

 

[Speicher]

numpty question alert

Is it still the case that if I have lots of shortcut icons on the desk top, then this slows everything down, as I am effectively creating two memories of everything?

 

[accountantpete]

No idea about Speicher's Q but I would download CCleaner first and run the Cleaner (top left hand icon) then run the registry check and fix all suggestions. Finally have a browse through Tools which will highlight all the programs you have and get rid of the unwanted ones.

The disc defrag is called Defraggler- downloaded separately.

 

[Night Train]

What I do is back up any documents, emails and address books and then reinstall Windows.
I then reinstall just the programmes that are needed starting with antivirus and firewall and then any windows service packs that are needed.

That saves all the cleaning and deleting and messing about. It also shows you how few programmes you really need on your computer and how fast it runs without the rubbish.

 

[rh100]

malwarebytes will clear out most nasties from the web, but you need a live anti virus aswel, Kaspersky is indeed quite good IMO. Be wary of MSCONFIG - only disable what you know for definitely you don't want, could create more problems for you.

Not sure about items on the desktop slowing the PC down, but would be best to place all in a folder within for example My Documents and just using the shortcut to that folder. If the items are only shortcuts themselves (has the little arrow on the icon) then they aren't very large and should not be a problem.

May be worth deleting the contents of the prefetch folder now and then (CCLEAN has an option for this I believe), not worth doing too often though.

Go through Add/Remove programs and get rid of all junk programs, get rid of all internet toolbars such as Yahoo and Google etc and screen savers also - they kill the PC.

Finally - run a defrag of the hard disk if it hasn't been done for a while - should increase speed a little.

If still having problems, try to figure out if it is memory or a rougue application, right click the taskbar and select task manager, select the processes tab and click the CPU column header once or twice to sort the list into the highest usage, anything constantly very high is a possible problem, but research it first before getting rid of it as it could be essential. If the hard disk is constantly churning, it points to lack of memory, and the virtual memory is in constant use.

 

[rh100]

a restore point IS NOT the same as a back up. Copy all your important data to another location also - should really make this a habit.

 

[on the road]

You can get Kaspersky anti-virus for £14.60 if you're a student and you don't need to prove you're a student

http://www.software4students.co.uk/Kaspersky_Anti_Virus_2010__1_PC_1_YR-details.aspx

 

[CopperBrompton]

What Nighttrain said: just backup everything then reinstall Windows. It takes about half a day to reinstall everything, but you'll get that time back and more by everything running so much faster. If the machine is powerful enough, upgrade to Win7 - it's really zippy!

 

[Globalti]

Thanks for all the advice, some of which I didn't understand or if I did, I simply wouldn't dare to follow! I have gone through and completely removed all the temporary internet files on all three users and the computer is running much faster, as fast as when it was new. I don't understand why those files should slow it down so much but hey....

Now the problem is that certain websites (Orange Mail, Club Penguin, some others) won't open and IE asks me if I want to load Adobe or something to make them work. Then it closes the site with a message about protecting the computer. I think I might reload Internet Explorer but am not sure how I can do this - surely if I uninstall it I won't have a browser, with which to go and get the latest version, right? We are running version 8 btw.

Added later: it's something to do with ActiveX and Adobe. I have Googled the message and the solutions seem to involve reducing the level of security on your computer, which I don't want to do and anyway, I can't understand why this has suddenly become a problem when we have changed nothing on the computer.

 

[Steve Austin]

Programs like adobe and activeX are constantly trying to update themselves. You may have set your firewall/security to stop these programs updating automatically, which isn't a bad thing, but it may be clogging the system with repeated update attempts.
Have you tried to manually update these programs?

or as many an IT specialist will suggest; try turning it off for ten minutes

 

[Steve Austin]

I like treesize free as it can tell you what is being used, and where all your memory has gone
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/downloads/index.cfm?categoryID=1503&itemID=23075

It won't manage it for you, but it will tell you how MB of music,data,programs you are using

 

[Garz]

Try using a different browser, and dont install much policing software, I only run a decent AV so I have minimal bloat.