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Maintenance of Vista laptop

NewSilkTurtle

NewSilkTurtle

Senior member
I've got a friend's laptop here, he left it with me to try to fix. He is a complete ignoramus about computers and has never done any sort of maintenance in this machine. It's loaded with trojans and various garbage. It's got Windows Vista on it which I have never used. It's a Dell.

To start with I thought I better find out what can be done with the recovery partition. Looking at the files on the partition, there are several years' worth of zipped backups. I assume some automatic backup feature is storing these on the recovery partition(!). The size of the partition is 14.6 gigs and it has only 6 megs of free space.

Never having used an automatic backup system myself, I don't know what all is in those zipped files nor if it is OK to delete some of the older ones. It seems like the machine runs very slow because of this filled partition. I've got it trying to defrag itself which seems hopeless so far.

So for the time being can someone tell me whether all those backups are needed? And if so, is it OK to move them onto an external drive or DVDs or something?
 
One other thing: I was trying to run sfc /scannow and it wouldn't let me - even tho I am logged on as an administrator. Is this a bug in Vista? Is there another way?
 
I went ahead and let it delete all but the latest backup. Took all night. But the error message about low disk space on the recovery partition still comes up, even though the files are gone. If there is an "invisible" recycle bin on that partition they might be in there but I sure can't see it and all that shows in the folder for the backups is one backup - oddly, it's not the latest one nor is it the earliest (there were 3 years' worth of them).

The machine is sitting right next to a wireless cable modem and can't even see the network... I tried using an ethernet cable and it won't go online that way either. This really is the strangest thing I've seen in while, because the AV program started running a scan around 11 PM last night and it said it was last updated two hours earlier, despite never having been connected to the internet... It found and quarantined two trojans then I shut it down because it seemed to have quit scanning.

Still mystified....
 
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