Slow Laptop

[Wrangler]

My 2 year old laptop (in constant daily use for emails) has over the past month or so become incredibly slow. Is there some form of housekeeping (apart from defrag) that will clear out any old rubbish that it is hoarding and get back to a reasonable speed??

[VHG]

It depends if it is your laptop that is slow or your broadband that is slow.

Some people confuse a slow broadband with a slow laptop, so check your broadband speed (online tools available).

If it is the laptop that is slow it could be because too many programs are starting up when the computer starts so try to stop too many programs autostarting.

Also make sure there is plenty of free space on the hard drives, as a full hard disk can cause a laptop to slow up.

Some people run registry cleaners to "speed" up a PC, but I am not convinced they actually work.

I have also seen CCleaner mentioned as a useful product, but again, I have never used it.

The REAL best way to speed up a PC is to reinstall windows from scratch, but this may be a bit drastic for some people.

[ACtheTROLL]

I'm with VHG
I luuuurv ccleaner
http://www.ccleaner.com/download

uninstall / delete / backup whatever you can
your aim is a mimimum of 20% free space (ideally much more)
then use ccleaner with default settings (you might want to save cookies)

run chkdsk /f on all partitions
finally defrag all partitions
(you should do all this a couple of times a year - don't get too fanatical about it

a bit time consuming ... but it's the best you can do without a complete crash and burn