Old laptop issues

[MartDude]

We've 'inherited' our daughter's old laptop - a Compaq Presario, nearly 5 years old. Windows XP, and AMD Turion 64 processor.

It's abysmally slow; I'll be asking for help with this later, when I've had chance to do the few clean-up tasks I'm familiar with.

Current question is : I've just downloaded AVG Free to it. It's identified the following as results/infections (:

C:\Program Files\Online Services\BT Yahoo\HPPre05.msi:\... Potentially harmful program Dialer.EOQ

This is shown three times.

Why should dialler software be identified as a threat? Should I remove it.

The scan's taking forever - been running for ca. 45 minutes, & only 85% complete

[Dalemac]

most probably the file is fine. Sometimes completely legitimate code snippets are found as "threats" because they are used elsewhere in mallicious software.


However, i would streongly reccomend reinstalling windows if possible, if not, then do a disk cleanup and the run the defrag tool.

Dale

[Viking]

What Dale said - reformat it and reinstall everything. You'll be surprised at how much faster it is. Oh, and see about popping some more RAM into it as well - that will help a lot.

[MartDude]

Defrag, clean-up & AVG PC Tuneup having failed to achieve any discernible improvement, and not knowing what the f**k to do next, I took the easy option, & gave it to a knowledgeable friend to sort out. Which he has done - reinstalled Windows, & now all seems infinitely faster & smoother.

Cheers!

[Kwackerz]

Just avoid big memory intensive programmes and it'll be fine.
Mrs K got a cheap secondhand laptop for 100 quid the other week, They had done exactly the same and reinstalled, stripped it back to just the bare essentials and used low memory programmes, Firefox browser, etc

She only uses it for internet browsing (Farmville on Facebook and the like) and it's fine. She's a bit gutted as her last lappy was a huge memoried, super dooper processor thing.