Virus or something else?

[angledge]

hotpantsgalore has a 4-year-old Acer laptop that has recently developed some super-annoying features. In particular, it can't seem to run a word processor to save its life: he cursor jumps around between lines (in fact, it does that on webpages too - dammit, that's annoying), it seems really slow, & generally it just seems to be running poorly.

She says she's run some anti-virus software checks on it, & it hasn't helped (I think she ran Kapersky?). What else should she do? Can we take it somewhere & get everything wiped off of it? I know she just wants to buy a new computer, but we really don't have the money right now.

Comments

[thepikey.livejournal.com]

I'm having issues with my Acer too. It heats up like a mofo, possibly it's just the fan, I dunno. Can't even burn a cd without it overheating and shutting down.

*thinks*

3 1/2 years old, too. Hm.

[krick.livejournal.com]

Before you do anything else, back up everything to an external hard drive.

A 4 year old laptop should be perfectly fine for most people's needs. Women. *shakes head* :) What is the model number (usually found on the bottom)?

Does the laptop have a track-pad or clit-mouse? It's possible that it needs to be cleaned or possibly replaced if it's going bad. Is the cooling fan working? If not, the system will overhead and throttle back to keep from burning up. This will make everything run very slow.

If that's not the case, then dig out the "system restore" CD(s) that came with it, and fire them up. Usually, a system restore CD will wipe the drive and re-image it to the way it was when you purchased it.

If you don't have a restore CD, your other option is to purchase an OEM copy of Windows XP. XP home is about $50. XP pro is around $100, I think. You can't buy XP in retail stores anymore, so you'll have to go online to find it.

Basically, pop in the XP CD and the laptop should boot from it. From there, you'll want to blow away the existing installation and re-install. The onscreen prompts are pretty clear. You're smart, you can figure it out.

Once XP is installed, then it's a matter of looking in device manager and figuring out what devices don't have drivers installed. Figure out what the devices are, dig up drivers either from the CDs that came with the laptop, or from the manufacturer's website and you should be good to go.

The drivers on the manufacturer's website will likely be a lot newer, but install the ones from the CDs first to get everything working, then update with the newer ones if you can find them online.