Hi Guys,

Quick question as I figure there are plenty of tech-savvy people here at HA that know quite a bit more than I do

Anyway, I've offered to help my in-laws with their computer (insert joke here), as lately it seems to have ground to a halt when doing most anything. I plan to remove any unnecessary / resource intensive apps, scan for (and hopefully remove) any malware/viruses, and update the anti-virus (or install AVG in it's stead). Has anyone ever done any similar cleanup jobs that might be able to offer some pieces of wisdom? At the moment I plan to go in with a flash drive armed with following utils:

- Ad-Aware (free ver.)
- AVG Antivirus (free ver.)
- CCLeaner

Does this seem sensible, and are there other (or additional tools) I should be using? Thanks in advance for any help.

I'd never "clean" a PC from malware. The only option for me is a start from scratch. A neighbor of mine didn't like this idea and asked someone else, I don't care. The people generally forget what a time intensive job it is to maintain a good system, if they are not able to maintain it. And they aren't, they tend to install any chapo bullshit from CDs they get from friends or which are giveaways etc. etc. A horror story. Reality

Personally, I set up XP for my relatives like this:

- User Accounts have no admin privileges, they are in the USERS group.
- Create a Users group group policy object (afair you need gpmc for this)
- Set up Software restriction policies for USERS. Don't forget to add the .lnk extension which is per default disallowed.
- Autom. Updates etc.
- I'm not a friend of the resident virus scanners idea, anyway, *hinthint* MS offers "MS Security Essentials" Virus scanner which is worth a try.

I tell them to think twice about what they want to install and what not. They do installation via "run as admin", no interactive admin logon. If installable software is small and they are in doubt about trustworthyness, I recommend to upload to virusscan.jotti.org

remove all useless and unnecessary programs.
configure mostly useless background programs on the task bar notification area (system tray) not to auto-start.
scan for malware. AVG is fine.
use the drive tools in windows to clean the hard drive. (CCleaner will work, too)
use a registry optimizer if you wish.
defragment the hard drive when you are done with everything else.

All else fails, reinstall the os.

@OmniCbex

I try to do a backup of my system with acronis true image, and when I notice any problem I just restore the old copy, and my system is "clean" again.


I would format, and re-install useful stuff. Then make a backup of system.

The software I always use for security : antivirus (Kaspersky or NoD32), a firewall like outpost or commodo (even if I already have a hardware firewall).

To improve performance, I try to set the pagefile to a fixed size to prevent fragmentation, and I defragment with Perfectdisk. Also I do a boot time defragmentation, , to remove fragmentation of system files. I disable "system restore" , which is for me only a way to waste disk space, (not useful for me).
Also recent perfectdisk version , help to quickly remove temporary files, or empty the recycle bin, which is a nice thing to do before defragmenting.

Finally I'd say: just avoid registry optimizer. I've never notice any performance improvement from these tools, this just screw the system.

Thanks guys, I did the cleanup over the weekend, it definitely didn't need a reformat but it was an interesting case study nonetheless. The computer was about 4 years old, XP Home w/ 512 mb RAM, which I'd think to be sufficient for what they want to use it for (internet and the occasional MS Office).

- There was a fair amount of junkware from when they originally got the computer, though most of it was benign. They did have a bunch of Windows Live crap (which would launch on startup) that required removal.
- Antivirus was up to date and ad-aware was already installed, scanned the system with both anyway and nothing suspicious came up. McAfee Security Center is quite a bloated program though.
- Ran disk cleanup and defragmenter, even though the analysis said that a defrag wasn't necessary.
- After all this the system response was slightly improved but still noticeably sluggish. The one final measure that seemed to have the best effect was adjusting the Windows "Visual Effects" Performance settings (Control Panel > System > Advanced) - switching to "adjust for best performance" (basically turning off all of the color, animation, and fading effects in Windows) made the computer much more responsive. Still strange though, I imagined 512k would be plenty for the system to run normally (Task Manager showed ample physical memory free), though it was only with this final step that Windows began to respond somewhat normally.