Vista PC Health Check
Just completed a full health check on a Vista desktop PC suffering from nothing more than sluggish overall performance. So what was the problem? Well, a combination of factors really.To start with, it didn’t help having a trojan virus hidden away behind the scenes. This came as something of a surprise to the owner, as she had paid good money for a well known AV product, kept it up to date and run very regular scans. Just goes to show that no AV software on it’s own is 100% fool proof.
The next problem was a common one. Loads of installed programs many of which were seldom used. You get a good feel about the state of a windows box by the appearance of the desktop. This one was literally crowded out with icons. Remember the maxim, ‘if you don’t use it, remove it’!
Internet performance was particularly poor. One tip that often helps with Vista and XP machines is to flush the dns cache, which sometimes get corrupted resulting in slow web access to favourite websites. It certainly came to the rescue in this case.
Finally came a RAM upgrade. The machine originally had 2gb of memory, which is a bare minimum as far as I am concerned for running Vista effectively. Once we doubled that to 4gb things looked a whole lot better.