Should I Just Wipe My Hard Drive?
My computer is full of crapola, I inherited it and it juss runs so so slow, its a Dell Inspiron 8600, it runs Windows XP. I know I have a few viruses and just want to start over basically. If I do this, do I lose my norton? my word 2007? Can I like torrent them or something? I can probably get the CD if I dive hard enough. should i just wipe this thing?
Find your Word ’07 disk and then wipe your drive. Don’t worry about Norton, that’s probably half the reason that you have the problems in the first place. You can use Open Office http://www.openoffice.org in place of Word if you can’t find it. Use avast! or Avira in place of Norton.
I personally use these on my computers:
avast! – anti-virus (Avira is good as well)
PC Tools Firewall – firewall (I like Zone Alarm better, but the free version isn’t available for Windows 7, yet)
MalwareBytes – anti-malware (on-demand only)
Spybot S&D – anti-spyware (on-demand only)
SuperAntiSpyware – anti-spyware (on demand only)
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Well if your willing to take a little time no. I used CCleaner and Iolo System Mechanic 9 (This costs like 30 dollars but comes with a really good firewall and Antivirus) on a friend of mines computer who had so much crap on it it would take 10 minutes just to open firefox. I put those two programs on his computer and let them run till they finished.. and his computer ran about as good as mine, Funny thing is.. I had three gigs of ddr2 RAM at the time we did this to his computer and he only had about 512MB of RAM along with his small single core processor. So if you want to spend 30 dollars and about 3 hours max. Thats what i reccomend. But if you dont want to spend the 30 bucks look up CCleaner its freeware, Let it run an analysis then run the cleaner and see if that helps. I highly suggest Iolo though, Most definately worth the 30 dollars.
You betcha.
Very often people waste endless hours trying to ‘fix’ a broken down Widows system when the easiest thing is a formatted (not repair) install.
Backing up your data (pics & doc’s & music) may be a 50/50 shot, as some malware can be hiding there, but if it’s hand-me-down anyway you likely don’t have critical stuff on it. But you can try.
XP systems very often run much better with a yearly ‘cleansing’ like this anyway.
Dump Norton; get Avast or Avira (both freeware); not sure on the Word 2007.
Be prepared for about 6 hours to do all the updating & system configuration. High speed (DSL) is a must for this.
BEFORE you take any further steps in this direction: back up your drivers to a separate CD!
It gets harder and harder to find them, and many places charge to get them.
And reformatting will sometimes ‘loose’ the drivers or not get the correct one.
With separate CD driver storage, accessing and installing missing drivers is far easier.
Try Driver Magician Lite (freeware);
http://www.snapfiles.com/Freeware/system/fwbackup.html
Use it to identify & back up all drivers for this BU. Always keep it with your unit.