Mother's Laptop and "A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing"

While visiting my Mother over the weekend, she complained that her Laptop was painfully slow. I thought it was just my Mother, but she reminded me that it worked fine when I first set up the Laptop and that my brother, sister and nice had all been using it and installed various things.  To cut a long story short, here are some of the things I discovered and how I fixed them.

1. Automatic Updates were Turned Off. The system runs VISTA and had no updates for a year and a half. While VISTA can be very slow at the best of times, the updates (particularly the Service Packs) have a huge impact on speed and resources. So TURN ON AUTOMATIC UPDATES and install all updates form Microsoft when asked. It took me a day to apply all updates that have been released over the last year and a half.
2. Three different versions of Microsoft Office were installed. When there was a problem with reading Word attachments at least two different people tried to reinstall Office without uninstalling previous versions. If you have a problem with a program, DO A COMPLETE UNINSTALL FIRST BEFORE YOU TRY TO REINSTALL.
3. The Laptop had never been Defragemented. When I checked, the system was set up to run a Scheduled Defrag on a weekly basis (at 3:00am on a Wed morning) , but the problem was that my mother never left her Laptop on at night. So if you have an Automatic Schedule for Defragmentation, make sure you leave your PC on at night and that your Power Saving features don’t turn off the PC before it has a chance to do a Defrag.

The final point I would make, is that it is much easier to sort out a problem if three well meaning people, have not tried to fix the problem. Call in somebody in the computer business straight away. The good guys will have a quick look and let you know what the likely costs are before they do any work.