"Cleaning up" your laptop

paulanthony

I was wondering what is the best way to go about this?

I have a 1gb RAM, 60gb HD 4.5 year old Dell laptop thats beginning to show signs of its age.

Theres very little of substance on the laptop apart from music, files and photos which are / can be backed up easily.

Things like standby and hibernate have stopped working. There are a lot of processes going on in the background and a lot of space is taken up by windows update files etc.

I have an original, shop bought Windows XP Professional CD.

Should I just backup everything and reinstall windows?

or is there a better way of cleaning it up and improving the performance?

Cheers,

Paul

tricky D

Before reinstalling, you could try Crap Cleaner to analyse and clean files. Then scan and fix registry issues.

If it's still running slow, especially on startup and shutdown, head over to the virus and malware forum, read the 'I think I have a virus' sticky and follow the instructions.

tpotter

To be honest, the best and quickest way to clean up a old windows system is to backup and reinstall. Usually there is only so far a program like CCleaner is going to take you and it doesn't hold a candle to how well a fresh install will preform...

Demeyes

I usually regularly run CCleaner but a fresh windows install will do wonders. Also CCleaner has a function to let you see what comes on it startup. Turn off anything you don't really want, like updaters and things like that. That should stop some background programs coming on and hogging resources You could also upgrade your Ram. It's a cheap enough way to improve the performance of an older machine.

biko

Before backing up scan your computer with several different scanners to eliminate virus that could follow the backup and then infect the new OS.

MooShop

I found this document very useful to improve the performance of my sister's laptop thats 5 years old and has a very low spec.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/northrup_restoreperf.mspx