Laptop gone sooooo slow

[minestrone]

Thanks all for the suggestions, not sure how to do most of it - I had AVG on the other laptop which is much older and much much faster than this newer one lol.

I slowed down after my son got home a couple of weeks ago and he use it lol, so I will check if he installed something news, mostlikely downloaded something.

How do I switch off the searching and indexing, from control panel/services?

Disable and Turn Off Windows Vista Search Indexer and Indexing Service - KezNews.com

That's for Vista, proably the same for 7.

I very rarely search for something so there is no point in having it on I think.

Speed it up for me quite a bit I think.

[BolshieBastard]

.......................... it might be worth trying free.avg.com AVG Free - Antivirus and Anti-Spyware | Free Virus Protection instead in case.

Oh god! Someone else 'recommending' AVG!

** Shakes head and leaves thread **

[RichardCranium]

It slowed down after my son got home a couple of weeks ago and he used it lol

a) break his knee caps
b) reformat the hard disk
c) reinstall the operating system
d) reinstall and reconfigure your applications
e) take a regular backup in future.
That will be the fastest solution.

To prevent it happening again
f) break his fingers.

Also:
g) please stop saying lol.

[Support Monkey]

as he installed limewire/bittorrent and its now sharing all your files with the rest of the world, check your page file it may need increasing and run chkdsk /r from a comand prompt and let it run when the machine restarts as this can sort alot of slow boot up issues

[Support Monkey]

Oh! and check your not low on diskspace if you are it could be the restore files in the system volume filling up (its a hidden system folder on the root of the C drive) Unhide it and give yourself full permissions to it to see how big the files are, delete the RP files within, then create a new restore point just in case

[Spacecadet]

On windows 7, try the resource monitor... its a a very handy tool and it can show you what's using the disk and for what purpose.