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Laptop unbelievably slow


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My daughter has a Medion Laptop, 1.3 Ghz Intel M processor; 256MB RAM; 60GB Hard Drive, running XP Home/SP 2. With her being away on a touring holiday I thought it would be a good idea to update everything for her. She has been complaining about it being slow for some time, but I had not realised just how slow it was, for example. it has just taken over 1 1/2 hours for Ad-Aware to scan 132000 files, I gave up and cancelled it after that.

I have ran SwatIt; Ad-Aware; SpyBot and Crap Cleaner so far besides doing a scan with the AV programme, E Trust. To show how slow it is, it has taken me over 9 hours to run them including downloading the latest updates for E Trust and Windows updates.

The Hard Drive is split into 3 partitions, 'C' which has 59% free; 'D' Back up and 'E' Restore.

I was going to try to get a bit more info. but it is getting past my bedtime.

Any ideas/suggestions will be very gratefully received.

P.S. It is the same laptop which Nellie helped me with about two months ago. With any luck it should still be clean but I wouldn't bet on it.

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Defrag - Yes. CHKDSK - No, so will try that.

Since ran SpyBot again, this time it picked up 2 instances of Swizzor, which have now been removed. Also ran Clean Up and deleted an awful lot of things, much too numerous to mention here. What has seemed to help a lot is that I downloaded and ran Windows Start Up Inspector. Almost half of the items in the list showed up as Not Required so closed them down. Another possible clue is that on Shut Down, there are 5 or 6 processes that come up as being slow to do so. With 1 or 2 it is necessary to click on End Task after getting the message Not Responding. I intended to open Task Manager to see what, if anything, was hogging the CPU but Task Manager on this laptop doesn't seem to have the option of checking, it only comes up with the one option, to end an application, there are no other tabs, i.e. Processes; Performance, etc. nor does it have a Toolbar.

Many thanks to both of you for your replies.

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Sounds like you know what your doing. Hows the pc after running those apps? Some other things I can think of that might quicken it up a little is a registry scan to get some of the garbage out. Uninstalling uneeded apps/drivers/services will help a LOT. Deleting or defragging pagefil.sys or hiber.sys. Editing the boot.ini file. There are so many ways to speed up a pc. This page has a very extensive list of performance tweaks. If you have questions about anything post back! :D

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1590

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Another very interesting site which I will need to investigate more thoroughly, thank cozofdeath.

Following all the suggestions given, and removing a lot of programmes from StartUp with StartUp Inspector has resulted in a much faster machine. Still a little on the slow side compared to my desk top but that's not really surprising as I have a bigger processor and more RAM.

Many thanks to all for your advice.

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