I have a laptop that is approx. 4 years old and it is getting REALLY slow. It has crashed a few times, hubby worked on it this weekend and cleaned it out, I have defragmented & cleaned stuff off. Is there anything else I should do? The guy at Best Buy told me the average life span for a laptop is approx 4-5 years so should I just by a new one?
Of course the guy at Best Buy is going to tell you that. He wants to make a sale. And then convince you to buy the extended warranty. First go and download the latest CCleaner. It will find and delete a lot of garbage windows checkdisk will not find. I ran it on my sister in laws laptop last Christmas and it found 4 gig of garbage. And hers is about 4 years old also.She said there was a very noticable increase in speed. Second dl and run AVG then dl and run Spybot search and destroy. then run the defrag on the hard drive. You may also want to invest in an external hard drive to back up your important information.
What is CCleaner? Hubby downloaded spybot & it is driving me crazy with pop ups, and I was already using AVG. I got another blue screen today and it locks up constantly! I am ready to throw it out a window. Should I have someone look at it, if so how costly could that be?
Post the model number and any PN numbers from the bottom of the unit. Just because its 4 years old doesn't mean it's a throw away. It could have been the latest greatest model in it's time and it may not be a big difference between it and a new one. Diagnostics on a laptop can take up to 3 hours and usually run around $50. Don't let them charge you by the hour and don't go to the chain store nerds. Plenty of independents out there doing the work for a fair price. Get references from them first. From the brief description you gave I can think of 2 possibilities. 1. Run hard drive diagnostic software. Free on every hard drive manufacturers web site. When you post the model I'll give you a link. You may have a failing drive. Some drives came with a 5 year warranty and you may get the replacement drive free. 2. Your Operating System is becoming an 'Inoperable System'. If you have the original CD's for the unit you get a gold star and a real cheap O/S reload. If not, you just get the bill. Can tell you more if I had the model, O/S, ram quantity, etc..... This can help identify it. majorgeeks PS: Cjeck you model against 'battery recalls' too. Pop ups from spybot are good. It means its working. Now .... you have to read them and learn what they mean. You'll find all the answers on the WEB. It's a love hate relationship with the WEB. We love the WEB, but, we hate the morphology.
here is the web page for it http://www.ccleaner.com/ here is their description: CCleaner is a freeware system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. Additionally it contains a fully featured registry cleaner. But the best part is that it's fast (normally taking less than a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware! another free software you can run is Belarc advisory http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html it will tell you all the software you are running on your laptop and all the hardware you have.
Belarc # Operating Systems: Runs on Windows Vista, 2003, XP, 2000, NT 4, Me, 98, and 95. # Browsers: Requires IE 3 or Netscape 3, and higher versions. Also runs on Opera, Mozilla, and Firefox AVG Compatible with Windows XP and Windows Vista Spybot While I like the Macintosh and use an old Mac regularly for personal stuff, Spybot-S&D does not yet support MacOS. There are also no fixed plans for a Macintosh version yet, as it would need many additional resources. As the Macintosh isn't as far spread as the Windows PC platform, it is also not a target that spyware makers have found yet. Therefore, the only targets that could be called spyware would be keyloggers and the like; for finding those I recommend using a regularly updated anti-virus program for Macintosh.
