If you want to get it back to "the way it was" it's about the only way. The windows Registry get's very bloated over time, and there's only so much registry cleaning tools can do. You can fight with this thing for hours on end, or you can do a backup of the important things on the system, and nuke it. It's like spring cleaning, you get to toss out all those things you thought you needed, but really didn't.
If that's too much for her to handle, or you don't have access to any sort of backup media ( Jazz / Zip drive, CDRW ) then you can try to identify some background processes that may be eating away at the CPU time. Check the task list and see if there are any extranious programs in there. If you're not sure about something, I find googling for it is a big help.
People measure computer speed in different ways as well, if the system is "too slow" does that mean it opens programs slowly? Or switching between applications is slow? Does it boot slowly?...
Chances are if the machine has suddnely become "too slow" it's because there's something running in the background that either she's installed and not realized it's always running, or it's something that was installed maliciously ( virus / trojan ).
Good luck!
|
