Need help fixing friends laptop

basslover1

Golden Member
Aug 4, 2004
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Like it says guys, I'm tryin to help my friend out here by sprucing up his laptop. It's fairly new from what I can tell, it's a Celeron 1066 with 256megs of ram running XP Home with I think a 20 gig HD (it takes about 5-10 mins to boot, thus why I don't have an exact number) and sadly enough my Celeron 733 with 192 megs of ram that I'm using right now is much much quicker than this almost 2 year newer laptop. We think spyware is a big problem, and it probably is, but every time I try to scan with Ad Aware or Spybot the PC freezes so I'm out of ideas on how to clean this thing up.

Any help or ideas on what might be causing it to run so sluggish?

Thanks.
 

Zepper

Elite Member
May 1, 2001
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You may have to just back up the data he needs to keep and wipe the drive and restore from the mfr's restore CD or partition. No fun, but that's life with Windwoes...

.bh.

:moon:
 

FreshFish

Golden Member
May 16, 2004
1,180
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My girlfriend's lappy was running like crap recently (spyware/adware, virus infections, etc). We tried to clean the registry, get rid of viruses, get rid of spyware/adware, defrag, etc...but it was still slow and pathetic, so I just had her reformat/newly install Windows. It was a quick fix and now it runs 1000000x better.
 

vegetation

Diamond Member
Feb 21, 2001
4,270
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Aside from obvious spyware, it's probably just bloated down from junk in the registry. Wipe the drive out and reinstall. Will save time in the long run.
 

basslover1

Golden Member
Aug 4, 2004
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See, my goal was to partition the HD and install Win2k on the partition and try to spruce up XP. I just ran Ad Aware and Spybot and defragged the HD over night and she's still runnin kinda slow. Since his laptop is on a network backing up files should be easy enough to do but I'm tryin to save that for a last resort. Also, would the SP2 have anything to do with it running a little sluggish?

Thanks guys.
 

basslover1

Golden Member
Aug 4, 2004
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Another thing, XP wont let me even access the Win2k disc because I would be "down grading" so I tried booting off the D drive then installing Win2k that way. Well when you get to the part where you select either format the HD and fresh install or Partition and install on the partition, it wont let me partition the drive. Have any ideas on that?

Thanks.