My mom was having a hard time with her computer. She complained it was slow. And then 2 weeks ago told me it wasn't "closing down" properly. So she ended up holding in the power off button until it finally closed down.

Last week I worked on it a bit but couldn't resolve the problem. But THIS week I had more time, and had also done a bit of research.

My research had told me that at least part of the problem was there were processes "hanging" that stopped the machine from quitting gracefully. I looked at the processes but couldn't figure out what they were.

My mom doesn't know anything about computers, so I also figured that popups and things probably got loaded on her computer -- without her knowing.

So this is what I did:

1. in Internet Explorer I went to:
tools--> internet options --> programs --> manage add-ons
She had a lot of "stuff" added there, so I DISABLED all of those unnecessary addons (like yahoo toolbar and google toolbar...)

2. She had a LOT of programs in "STARTUP" that were unnecessary. (Dell help? HP help? )
So I searched on STARTUP to find where those folders were in her computer. Once I found those folders, I reviewed what apps she had in the STARTUP folder. She didn't need most of them to start up , so I moved those to a new folder I'd created called "DONOTSTARTUP" that way i could find them and recover if I needed to.

3. I cleared her cookie history

4 I cleared her "history"

And hooray! after doing all that, her computer "quit gracefully"