Cleaning up an old laptop

[Kaleva]

My 2008 Dell laptop was often slow and erratic. So, yesterday I spent hours on this trying to improve its performance.

One thing I noticed was that when using CCleaner, I had Mega bits of Windows System Error reports. Even though I had run disk cleaner and CCleaner regulary for a long time now, I always had lots of system error report files.

Yesterday, I did some reading on the internet and learned I could turn that off (the generation of such error reports) and by uninstalling old programs and running disk cleaner, I reduced disk usage from 47% down to 29%.

A free program I downloaded from CNet was "Remove Empty Directories". Ran that and saw I had lots of empty directories which the program allowed me to delete.

Ran the registry cleaner part of CCleaner.

I then defragmented the hard drive and that alone took over 6 hours.

The computer is now running much faster.

[hobbit709]

1. Another thing to do is download and run PC Decrapifier

and get rid of all the crapware that Dell bogs their machines down with. Escpecially all the "trial offers" and the wild tangent games-which are nothing but spyware.

http://pcdecrapifier.com/

[Kaleva]

2. Thanks!

Downloaded and ran it.

[RC]

3. Have you checked the Application and system Event Viewers?

Look for any errors since the defragment you noted. This could give you a clue to any more on going problems.

[Kaleva]

4. I'll do that soon. Thanks for the advice!

I have also uninstalled a couple of free anti-virus programs and replaced it by downloading the free Microsoft Security Essentials program. Getting rid of those two others has really increased the boot up speed.