Beware Of Daughters Carrying Laptops

A week ago I got my first inkling something was wrong. Helaine told me Stef had told her “BabyLaps,” her laptop computer, was running really slowly.

I had Steffie load some remote assistance software and attempted to fix things from here. The computer only ran slower!

“Bring it home,” I said. And so, tonight she did.

When I walked into my office, there was the laptop sitting under a note with the sketch of a tearful face and three words, “fix me please.”

For three hours, I’ve been trying just that – and failing. This is so frustrating!

There are no outward signs pointing to the reason the computer has become slovenly. There is definitely something wrong and it’s waiting to be discovered!

OK – that’s the bad news. The good news is, I can get in as the Administrator and run the machine perfectly in safe mode. In other words, there’s no hardware problem and the operating system seems intact.

This will take a long time.

4 thoughts on “Beware Of Daughters Carrying Laptops”

  1. Any new virus upgrades? The latest version of McAfee, which I installed on both my PC and laptop, really slowed down the laptop noticeably. I’m sacrificing the speed because I use it on so many networks.

  2. Geoff,

    If its a Dell, take the drive out, hook up the drive to a USB enclosure, copy the data to another computer, and wipe that sucker out and do a restore. It will take you less time to do that than figure out what’s slowing it down and how to get rid of it. Its probably spy/mal/adware that’s causing the problem. When in safe mode, those programs don’t get loaded or don’t run because they don’t detect an online connection.

  3. http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/programs.php

    That’s the page for hijackthis a progam that looks at your registry and gives a report file of all the processes and programs that are running as well as what is in the windows registries.

    This info can be posted to various forums. You can then get some help narrowing down what ad or malware is screwing you up and how to get rid of it.

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