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"

If you haven't ran these yet... I would.

Disc Clean-up and Defrag.


This should be done on a regular basis...

Once done, you should see a difference in the speed of the computer.


Abbie

Thanks,
you are right!

A friend was also having probs. with her 'puter not shutting down correctly and also re-booting itself. Twice, to the PC repair shop she took it.

Though this doesn't sound like what was causing the prob. for your mom's 'puter, it might be helpful to others:

If using older version of Netscape, say version 7, bump it to 9; Netscape 7 is buggy and will cause machines to reboot (and not when wanted).

If a lot of probs. are occurring, and Service Pack 3 (SP3) has been installed on a maching with XP O/S, rollback or uninstall SP3; SP 3 has been causing a number of people probs.


On a machine that is starting funky or suspected of having something "hanging," another thing that might help is using the System Configuration Utility, and doing a diagnostic startup, as well as doing a selective Startup by enabling/disabling startup items.

The Utility can be located by using Run, then, msconfig under the Start menu and/or by going to the Start menu, then, Help & Support and typing: System Configuration Utility.

to get that can help too. Ccleaner which can clean out dead entries left behind in the registry and can also show you what programs run on start-up and allows you to disable them. You don't need things like yahoo messenger loading on start-up. Call them when you need them.

Spybot is another good program. You may need to run this one several times until you get an all clear, that is it finds nothing on scan.

As for toolbars...it's not enough to just disable them....click on Start>control panel>add/remove programs and remove the toolbars there. Any programs your friend doesn't use or that might be suspect get rid of.

The programs I've mentioned above can all be found at http://www.filehippo.com

If you have any questions about this stuff let me know.

Was she using Vista or XP?