Help Windows tuning (spware removal etc.)

[old.user4556]

I'm off to visit my sister tomorrow and I've been tasked the job of "fixing" her computer. Now, it's old with not a lot of memory (it's probably a Celeron jobby, 1 GB ram, Windows XP, 80 GB drive) so it's going to be generally shit, but what sorts of tasks are the favoured for tweaking a clunky box these days?

I used to use Ad-Aware for all spyware removal in combination with a file clearout, a defragmentation, msconfig thingy and boot-vis.

Can anyone give me a shortlist of anything else that's a worthwhile and free tool to unleash some speed? Any registry cleaning needed?

 

[Bob007]

malewarebytes or ad aware for spyware crapola. or both.
Ccleaner for clean up and startup tweaking. Will do reg as well.
Acronis, take an image and save yourself some time next time round

Some tweaks.
My Computer - Properties-Advanced

Untick the following boxes

Animate windows when maximizing
Fade or slide menus into view
Fade or slide ToolTips into view
Fade out menu items after clicking
Slide open combo boxes
Slide taskbar Buttons
Smooth-scroll list boxes


right click recycle bin, click properties. Check the size. 2gig should do most ppl so anything above may be a awaste(if space is a bit of an issue)

 

[nath]

Remove more or less everything from the startup. If you're confident fiddling with the registry, check out HKEY Local Machine and HKEY Current user areas for Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

That's basically the registry startup location, check what shit is running there, make a backup (file>export) of each run folder and delete any useless crap. For example, itunes installs quicktime, quicktime installs the quicktime task icon - qttask.exe, completely useless. Look for other shit like that to delete, often there's loads of shit here that once removed helps the system run smoother.

 

[smurkin]

I think you could try ashampoo winoptimiser (think thats the name). There used to be a demo version. It will let you control the startup programs and prune the registry (beware, it can sometimes prune too efficiently depending on what is installed, so do a system restore/imade first). Various other system optimisations.

 

[old.user4556]

Excellent, cheers guys.

 

[old.user4556]

Well, the PC itself is fine - spyware free, 70% of hard disk available, full defrag, AVG running, all IDE channels running correctly, relatively light use in terms of it's used for email, web, word processing, synching ipods and storing some photos. Nothing fancy.

The performance was horrific, it took an age to get the desktop loaded and forever to even open an internet window. Then I realised that it actually had 256 MB of RAM, of which only 192 MB was available due to onboard video. The memory was swallowed up just by loading up the machine, everything was getting swapped into VM (which was set to 250 MB and not helping!).

Obvious solution, more memory. I've got a matched pair totalling 1GB that I'm going to put in it - if I need it again, I'll just buy some; it's so cheap these days.