My daughter's laptop slowed to a crawl last week. Despite up-to-date antivirus and anti-spyware software, something (or things) worked to make it unusable. I knew that we had reached the point where we needed to reinstall Windows. I had not done this since back in the Windows 3.1 days, when it seemed like you needed to reinstall once every month or so. But Windows Vista is huge, and there are so many more devices and applications. So I checked out Leo Notenboom's site http://ask-leo.com/ for advice. Leo has lots of great posts on all things technical, but especially directed at home users who may not have an extensive IT background. If you listen to Leo, you'll have fewer problems with your computers in the long run. Unfortunately, we have not been heeding most of Leo's advice.
So the first thing we did wrong was not having recent backups. We do have a portable hard drive, but our backup schedule is sketchy at best. The computer running Windows was so slow as to be unusable, so we could not use it to do a backup.
Luckily, we were able to boot the computer into safe mode with a DOS command line only. Annie was fascinated to find out that the command line even exists. I struggled for a few minutes to copy her data to the portable hard drive using the copy command, cursing it for not having a recursive option (why can't DOS be like Unix?). Then we googled "recursive copy dos" and became reacquainted with the xcopy command. We used xcopy to copy all of Annie's current data to the portable drive.
Then, using the OS reinstall CD that came with her laptop, we were able to reinstall Windows Vista. That part was easy. But the driver reinstall CD was not easy to navigate. We finally found an application on that CD that allowed us to reinstall audio, video, and communication drivers that matched the hardware installed on the laptop, so we could use the highest screen resolution and get out to the Internet.
First thing we did was to install the latest version of AVG antivirus (the free version) and get that up and running. Then we ran Windows Update (71 updates since the laptop install of Windows). Then we installed Firefox and Microsoft Office and a few other applications.
The laptop is running smoothly and quickly now, and we've learned a bit about backing up from the DOS command line and building up a machine from scratch (well, not completely from scratch, but close enough).
