Laptop performance deterioration?

[Chillalex]

ok i know theres a few techy people on here, more than myself, and this is just an inquiry for the woman. Its not important enough for me to scout round pc forums, ask, and look like a tard.

She's had two laptops, both toshiba, and both just get progressively SHITTER. they just end up chugging, crunching, horrible performace.

Current is vista, 2gb mem, decent dual core cpu (forgot speed) and when she first got it, it was great. Now, however, it crunches like a similie.

Any reason why? I defrag the disk for her every time I'm there, run disk cleanup, all the basic maintenance things, and delete programs she doesnt need, but to no avail. Its like a hardware problem but hopefully isnt.

So any clues? Any help would be ideal. I'm not sure if we can wipe the disk and start a fresh install, either. (wouldnt know how, on a store set-up laptop.)

[scoot]

best way to test would be to reinstall, then of course you know if your dealing with a software problem or not (from what you have said so far it sounds more of a software issue). Toshiba laptops come with recovery disks, the most recent ones seem to waiver the almost standard now recovery partitions. in anycase, you should have some recovery disk(s) that came with the machine, pop the first one in, boot from the CD and follow the on screen instructions, of which there are very few, you cant really mess that side of it up too much, providing you understand what the options given are.be aware that any data on the machine will be lost during this procedure.

also just as a precaution, search google for m-bam, download, install, update and run a scan, it should find most malware related issues on the system that may be causing the machine to slow down

[Aero]

which version of vista? i've seen on a few computers/laptops that vista basic is super gay! it'll start to slow down after a short period of tome then, every time you switch it on it seems to get worse! it's like they're just tryin to get you to upgrade to a better 1

[Chillalex]

vista ultimate something

or home premium

basically, not the basic version.

I talked to Joe and his theory seemed sound.

Cheers scoot as well. I did say its not my laptop and I'm not always around too frequent, so theres not much I can do sometimes. I will definitely try that m-bam thing for her, and I've asked her to see if shes got any discs that came with it.

Sounds good that its just a software issue. Worse comes to worse I can just wipe it, (if she finds the discs it shipped with) and start her again.

[Joe =/]

Yeahhhhh booiiiiiy, .iso ftw, then WIPE her shit. Errr ... take that whichever way you want to bruthah

[LiLFLiP]

The more you use your computer, the more your computer's registry gets fucked up with shit. Defragging does nothing to sort out your registry, unfortunately. It inherently will just get shittier with time. Reducing the amount of services/programs that come up on startup will also help.

[Joe =/]

start>run>msconfig is your best friend

[Fozy]

I'm gona say that it may be one of ultimate's security systems. It saves tonnes of back up data (restore folder to previous date to be most costly) every new folder makes it have more data to be stored, you get me? Try disabling it? xx

[Chillalex]

cheers del, I did lamp out a load of her start up programs when i was there last

helped a little, the cpu isnt constantly getting pounded like it was. Any way to clean up the registry?

Iain, that sounds about right, too. I ran disk cleanup once, got rid of 1gb of crap (queued user error reports or something) then within a day (hours!) it had racked up a few hundred mb of crap again, same deal. Didnt get chance to disable it, will do next time.

Anyone know how to enable task manager? I know it sounds stupid, but ctrl+alt+del doesnt work, neither does ctrl+alt+esc (it somehow changed to that on some vista editions I think) but when I try calling it up through processes its "disabled by administrator", but her only account on there IS the administrator. I couldnt for the fucking life of me find where to turn it back on, really annoyed me, because I couldnt really see what was running and what wasnt (found process manager, it was a piece of shit.)

[Nemo]

wipe the drive and install xp.