Hi i bought my dad a laptop about 6 months ago and all was well untill by little brother moved in and started doin god knows what with it. He has installed things i dont know about like limewire n such n downloaded tons of crap. Anyway its now running quite slow now. so the question is should i just do a clean up or reinstall vista using the disc that came with the p.c?
first try system restore take it bak 2 before he started using it but by doing this everythink u installed wont be there but everythink in My Documents wont be touched
Well a complete format and reinstall is about as clean as it will get. But of course then you lose everything on the system. System restore can get you out of problems but is not always very effective. Only other method is by manually uninstalling all the stuff he put on there, making sure he does not have folders and folders full of music and such that is taking up vital HDD space, and running several programs like Spybot and Ad Aware SE to clean out any spyware, addware and trojans you may have.
just stick in your windows disc. When you want to reinstall it the program will first format the hard drive and then re-install Windows. Warning, this will take quite a while to do. No to mention you will spend a bit of time getting all of your programs and windows updates back. But you will have a fresh and clean running system when your done.
try adaware first.get rid of tracking cookies and spyware first then see how it runs.format as a last resort.is it just slow or is it freezing up or getting a blue screen of death?
