Our computer has been a wreck for about a month now. It has slowed down to a snail’s pace and we pretty much now do most work off our laptop at the kitchen island rather than sit and curse at the desktop computer.
This morning I went through and deleted a bunch of software that we just don’t use anymore. I’m hoping that tonight Denis and I can pick a couple more that can be deleted to free up space. Once I was done I then began running the anti-virus, anti-adware program. It’s now three hours later and it’s STILL running. Our computer is that slow (and bogged down since we have two hard drives in there). So far it hasn’t discovered any viruses, which is good. But it still doesn’t explain why it’s so slow.
In any event, I brought out an old keyboard to use at the laptop (since I HATE laptop keyboards), but it’s still frustrating because our mouse won’t plug into the laptop either (and I hate laptop “mice” too). Denis is going to see if his office has any USB-port mice available to bring home until we can decide what to do with our computer. We certainly can’t afford a new one right now, but we also can’t afford for this one to break. We have a LOT of software on there that we can’t get back if it breaks. And it’s all software that we use. So we need to figure out how to get it back into working order.
As a safety, I also took the time last night and this morning to move over a lot of our important data from the two hard drives to our external hard drive so that they don’t get lost if the machine breaks down. We already had all our music and family photos on there, but I took the time to move all Cootiehog info, old family videos, my new website info, my freelance work, my mom’s website stuff, and a bunch of other things that we can’t lose. I’m sure there is more that I missed, but I can let Denis do that tonight.
In any event, this post was to complain about the fact that I hate laptops. I really do.
Update at 7:40 p.m.: No lie – after NINE HOURS of scanning for viruses and spyware, we found 3 viruses and about 40 spywares running on the machine (the spywares were all related to online ads such as doubleclick and adclick stuff). After cleaning that, we went into our programs list and proceeded to delete 13 pieces of software that we didn’t need/want anymore, and this is in addition to the 4 I deleted earlier today and the 2-3 that Denis removed last night. And sure enough, the machine is running a bit better. Not heaps better, but not so dead-slow that I just get ticked off waiting.
Good news, bad news. No viruses found.
I did copy a lot of stuff off to the external drive yesterday. Let me delete all of the files on there that I copied over and don’t need there any more. I don’t think space on our hard drive is the issue here, but I could be wrong. It seemed to get bogged down around the time we installed the magic jack and/or Firefox. I know you unplugged the magic jack from the computer, but what about uninstalling any software you had to put on there and testing to see if that helps fix the slowness? We can always reinstall it, right?
Good news is, I scored you a usb mouse, and you should have that in your hands tonight.
Firafox won’t bog down your computer.
If the USB mouse doesn’t work, you can get a USB adapter from Target or Walmart (I can’t remember where I got mine). Basically it’s a USB cord that has two port ends on it – one for the keyboard and one for the mouse. It’s what I have and use when I work at home.
Update: it’s STILL working on the anti-virus search and has found one thus far. It has looked at over 300K files since 9 a.m. this morning!! Will it EVER end? I’m sick of this laptop!
LOL…funny how different our experiences are. We have eight working computers in our house, and only one is a desktop. We’ve slowly replaced everything with laptops and will NEVER go back. The desktop is not that old but reminds us all of a dinosaur and no one wants anything to do with it!
What we are sick of is DELL laptops. We just bought CJ a Toshiba for her birthday this week and she is loving it. Someday when we get rich LOL we’ll probably replace everything with Macs.
I don’t mind laptops when I can have a keybaord and mouse attached. But typing on laptops is a pain because the keyboard is just too dang small. The perk of this laptop, however, is that compared to the desktop it’s lightning quick!
Cathi, I love my Mac. I have an Intel 24″ IMac. I just installed memory to take it to 4 gig. It just works! I installed Firefox and Thunderbird, plus NeoOffice (free) and Open Office (free). The latter two are freebees that provide Office functionality (Word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database, drawing application). They can read/write Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Visio files. Open Office is the more generic version, NeoOffice is the same core software customized for Mac.
I did pay for VMWare to run Windows in a Mac window for two pieces of software that don’t have Mac versions. One is a Bible program and the other is a ebook application that loads books to my PDA. The nice thing is that I only run Windows when I need to, and it is off in a window where if it crashes, nobody cares…