Shoutbox

im trying to sort out my parent's friend's laptop... it takes ages to boot and takes ages to do anything.

i cleared out its virus vault (had literally thousands of viruses!?)

removed around 40 spyware problems and a trojan... but its still running really slow (but significantly quicker than before)

ive got rid of a lot of startup processes, and checked all of what is running, but windows is still lagging like a beeyatch. why?

any help would be really appreciated!

thanks

Specs?

erm, its really old... but it used to work fine.

just waiting for it to load and ill post them >.<

Haha, well if it's really old, then of course it's going to be slow - because all the updates you install and what not slow it down a hell of alot.

Stick linux on it

Well, one thing that tend to work is the classic format (I know that it's more like avoiding the problem than fixing it, but hey, usually it works).

Also, you said it worked fine before, and that it was slow now. Then you removed some spyware, which made it "significantly quicker than before". Maybe this is actually the speed it was running on before, so that you now have, in their eyes, fixed it.

EDIT: Also...

quote:

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Originally posted by M73A
im trying to sort out my parent's friend's laptop

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quote:

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Originally posted by Nathan
Stick linux on it

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I wouldn't go that far without at least consulting them

nah its still taking ages to turn on and clicking start you can go make a cup of tea and itll be done by the time your back... it was REALLY slow before. lol

specs:
Intel celeron 2.60ghz
224mb RAM
XP SP2 Home
28gb hdd

quote:

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Originally posted by M73A
224mb RAM

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Upgrade now, if you want any speed increase

Wow, that's certainly an old one... but it still passes the recommended XP requirements, so that shouldn't be an issue. How much free space is there on the HDD? Also, while this won't likely fix anything, you should throw SP3 on as well.

What processes are running? A huge number, and anything "dodgy" on the list? And I assume you already checked what automatically runs at startup using Autoruns or something similar?

EDIT:

quote:

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Originally posted by Nathan
Upgrade now, if you want any speed increase

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Nathan, I already tried to point out that it's not even his computer And it's still running slower than usual.

lol well, what is REALLY strange, i've left it for like five minutes whilst on here.... everything has started up and it seems to be wqorking alright.

but why does it take around 10 minutes to boot? my older desktop has similar specs and doesn't take THAT long, and all this thing is loading (besides system things etc) is avg security centee and a dsl agent thing.

EDIT:

i've gone through all the processes and startups.... removed all the dodgy stuff and some malware and shit was found by spybot, that got rid of a few too. now all thats left is avg stuff, toshiba stuff or windows stuff...

ah i cba with sp3, that will cripple the little thing haha.

quote:

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Originally posted by M73A
lol well, what is REALLY strange, i've left it for like five minutes whilst on here.... everything has started up and it seems to be wqorking alright.

but why does it take around 10 minutes to boot? my older desktop has similar specs and doesn't take THAT long, and all this thing is loading (besides system things etc) is avg security centee and a dsl agent thing.

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Well, try un-installing AVG, then booting it up without it and then installing it back, and check if there are any differences. Do the same with the dsl agent thing (if you have means to install it back on, else just disable it).

And btw, these are AVG's system requirements:

quote:

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Intel Pentium 300 MHz
30 MB free hard drive space (for installation)
256 MB RAM

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So it doesn't meet the RAM minimum requirement, you should perhaps look for another anti-virus program (did he recently upgrade from AVG7 to AVG8? That might affect the speed as well? What version of AVG is on atm?)