Cleaning up Windows XP - any ideas?

D_Brasted

D_Brasted

D_Brasted

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10 Oct 2003
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Hi,

I'm soon to be given a fairly old laptop running XP Home, and will need to "clean it up" in order to be able to run the software I need (Dragon Naturally Speaking Essentials 7) with any degree of usefulness, as the spec is pretty near the minimum required.

I'd appreciate any suggestions for software I can use to help with the cleanup, and any tips. Is it just a matter of uninstalling everything I possibly can and then running a registry cleaner? Unfortunately I can't reinstall Windows - it's an OEM version, and I won't be given any discs...

Thanks.
 
Ok, the first thing I would do is..

Make sure the only thing running is your Anti-virus/firewall

Download CCleaner here

Run CCleaner it should delete a fair few Gigabytes of crap you don't need like cookies and thing's like that.

If your certain your system is not infected with spyware then you will not need to run a spyware scan but if your not sure then download spybot

Then install the program you need to install it should run better than it would before you can CCleaner you should also defrag your pc once you have ran CCleaner as well.

Hope this helps, that is what I run on my pc once a week.
 
Like jbloggs says, borrow an OEM cd that matches your XP version. So XP Pro OEM needs XP Pro OEM.

Then you can just use your XP key.

Then CCleaner and some registry stuff to clean up XP.

Or you could download nLite, copy the XP OEM cd to disc and remove the bloatware and rubbish in XP you won't need. Then you can also add in your CD key so you can have an automated install. :D

So nLite removes rubbish, making XP install faster and run faster as there is less crap to manage.
 
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