Hello everyone,
I’ve been traveling the past few days and I’m now at the home of my parents where I will be staying for a week or so. My parents have (and use) a computer, and I’m absolutely thrilled that, at their age (mom 82, dad 84), they have not shied away from technology. They certainly don’t understand everything about the computer, but they are making an effort to understand and use email, word processing, the internet, etc. Good for them!!
Shortly after I arrived my father mentioned that he had switched from DSL to Comcast cable. He told me that the computer was running slow and asked me if I would take a look at it. Well, the computer (Dell Dimension 2400, Windows XP, Pentium 4 CPU, 256MB of RAM!) was running incredibly slow all right, so today I would like to tell you what I found and what I did:
1) Full scan with CCleaner and removed thousands of junk files.
2) Full scan with the CCleaner registry cleaner and deleted the many obsolete registry entries.
3) Full scan with PureRa and removed many more files that CCleaner didn’t see.
4) Removed many unneeded programs with Revo Uninstaller.
5) Full scan with the Revo “Junk Files Cleaner” and removed even more unfound files.
6) Full scan with Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware. System came up clean.
7) Full scan with Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool. System came up clean.
8) Removed all of the Comcast software (Desktop Doctor, Tool Bar, Email program, etc.).
9) Opened Windows Firewall (which was enabled) and unchecked (closed) any exceptions.
10) Full defragmentation and optimization with MyDefrag (formerly JKDefrag).
11) Removed Avast AntiVirus Software and replaced with Windows Security Essentials.
12) Tuned and optimized the Internet connection with “TCP Optimizer”.
13) Ordered two 512MB sticks of SDRAM memory from Crucial.com (will work wonders for the Dell 2400).
The computer is now running quite fast even when you consider the paultry 256MB of Random Access Memory. My mom & dad are amazed and happy!! I’m happy too because it was great to be able to do something nice for my parents!
Professor Randy says: Do something nice for your parents too – fix their computer!!!
