2014 Archives

[clueless]

my computer is a bit old, but i just wanted it to play one game on, so I dusted it off and  restored it back to factory settings but it is painfully slow still.

i am not computer literate at all so -

why would restoring it not return it to its original speed?  didnt I completely wipe off all the useless stuff my kids put on it that I assumed was making it so slow when i stopped using it?  

i have read a little to try to figure out why its so slow and there was some mention of a recovery cd, but i do not have a cd drive on this laptop so i have no recovery disks.  do i need them?  what do they do?

I am sure I am missing something, sorry I sound so clueless, but i really am!

[Alan-London]

Well, if like me, you buy a new machine to replace your much loved workhorse that sadly has seen better days and you invariably are a little disappointed that the new one, while faster, doesn't seem to be that much nippier!
However when, for what ever reason, you need to fire up the old one it is now running at a snails pace!! Even after a complete reinstall it still crawls alone. It's a fact of life unfortunately. I had need to dust off my old laptop and after reinstalling the OS it almost feels unusable even after tweaking etc.

I gather that you have not performed a reinstall. If this is the case then simply uninstalling (or worse, just deleting) programs is unlikely to clear everything from the registry. There may be numerous drivers, services etc still running which will likely slow it down. You may well have a recovery option available which would perform a reinstall - check the user guide for this.
Even then, don't expect miracles!

[clueless]

thank you.  ill try to find the user guide and see if I can uninstall any programs that might be there, but I kind of thought everything woud be wiped out.

thanks again