Newbe needs help with OS

Diamond7

Hi Guys. I have a 5 yr old Asus laptop with XP (SP3) which went bad on me last week. It went so slow on me on startup i thaught it was frozen. it was extreamly slow to do anything, including a typing lag. it started a bit better on slow booting. I have always used updated AVG and Malwarebytes and a scan with each since the problem (which took hours) showed all clear except a few tracking cookies. Problem might have come from a dodgy download of photoshop elements(silly mistake) or from installing GIMP(my laptop might not have met sys reqrmnts) after i uninstalled elements. Since then i have striped all unnessisary software away, defragmented and updated and numourous restarts. It workes alot better now but still not right and since my last windows update a new user account called (ASP.net mashines a...) has turned up which i deleated. Also i have three versions of microsoft.NET framework installed which i have no idea where they came from. I have been hours apon hours trying to fix this. Any help would be greatfully accepted.

Capt'n Midnight

check for malware
when you are sure it's clean then try a system restore to before last week

woolymammoth

the sad truth about updates, is that sometimes they are evil. But they're still a necessary evil! I would also recomment the restore to a time before you installed those applications, or even before you got the updates. then make sure all other unnecessary programs are removed.

You can use the likes of CCleaner to check your startup items, it makes it pretty simple. Just either disable or delete the unnecessary startup items, leave any security or important stuff alone. As much as i used to love AVG, i always found it to be a hog, and i abondened it years ago. Right now i would recomment MS Security Essentials. Malwarebytes and those are great, but i wouldn't have them running in the background all of the time, just when i need them.

and as for photoshop, try paint.net instead, or even the Photoshop Online Editor, et. al.

Fysh

What's the spec on the machine? I've noticed that systems with single-core moderate specs and limited memory are taking a particular beating with the .NET related stuff, and .NET Framework 4 was pushed out recently - maybe that's a factor?

Diamond7

It won't let me system restore to anytime before the problem??? The machine is only single core but was high spec at the time. The latest version of .NET Framework on here is 3.5. Don't know about system memory but i have always kept 10/15% free HHD memory at least. where does this .NET framework come from and what does it do? I cannot uninstall earlier versions of it still in the system the normal way without following some detailed instructions i found on support.microsoft.com which involve disableing installers and stuff (being a novice this is starting to get out of my depth) and i suspect wont work anyway. Could this .NET stuff be the root of my problems? Howcome system restore won't work, without giving reason or an error report? Has anyone come across user accounts being opened automaticly by ASP.Net and why.
thanks for your help so far guys!

Fysh

The .NET Framework is a software environment from Microsoft, it's a standardised set of tools that software developers can use to make certain things easier. Unfortunately, it's generally also a great way of slowing older machines down to a crawl Getting rid of it is also non-trivial, as you've discovered - you need to use a special removal tool to do it (see here for details).

System Restore will only have a certain numer of restore points depending on how much space you allocate for them. Therefore you may not have a restore point available that predates the problem's occurence, in which case you'll need an alternative solution. What happens when you try to restore back to your earliest available restore point?

However, I'm thinking more about how much RAM you've got, your hard drive's rpm, and the clockspeed and L2 cache on your processor when I ask about the specs.

Diamond7

Thanks for the link fysh, think i'll try it out.

I don't use .Net and I don't program or develope any, so should i just uninstall all versions of .NET? or would this adversly affect the registry or the running of the machine?

I tried to restore back to the earliest point and same as before it didn't work. It said something about changes made to drive G:\. On my machine G is usually something running on the second USB port(rare enough).

I used CCleaner ( Thanks Wooly) and between it and whatever else i have done the machine seems to be behaving a lot better but i still suspect its not 100%. are there any performance tests i can try?

I have 1Gb Ram, 5400 rpm, L2 cache of 1024Kb and a core speed of 1600MHz (is this clockspeed?). I should hope these were good specs for 5 years ago as i paid alot. I understand my machine is old but i cant afford a new one right now and if i can somehow furute proof it, i might get another while out of it yet. Last week it was going to meet gravity from a hight but thanks to your help guys i'll give it another go.

Fysh

You can try uninstalling it to see if it gives you a performance boost, but there are a good few programs around now that depend on it, so you may run into unexpected issues as a result.

In terms of your system specs, they seem fine for 5 years ago. The main thing you're probably taking a hit from now is the RAM - 1GB isn't bad, but if you can go up to 2GB (or better yet 4GB assuming the system supports it) you'll most likely see a performance boost. You should be able to get an upgrade to 2GB for ~€40-50 or so. I would suggest using something like the Memory Configurator to find suitable and compatible memory for your laptop.

Installing it is usually a simple case of unscrewing a panel on the underside of the laptop, removing the old SO-DIMMs and slotting in the new SO-DIMMs. Get the manual from the Asus website first and check what they say if you're not sure about how to do it.

Diamond7

Nice one Fysh. i'll have to look into that.