Blood for the Baron!

I've got my sister-in-law to be's laptop at the moment, after she got some nasty spyware stuff on it. Cleansed that, but it's running shite and is very cluttered. Can anyone recommend any good free software I can download and stick on it for her? Certainly needs a good registry cleaner and and virus checker and stuff to delete all old fragments of crap off it seems, but as I've got a mcaffee subscription I don't now which free ones are good or bad. Any suggestions very much appreciated!!

C Cleaner is a good registry cleaner. And AVG full version for viruses but it costs something like £40+ depending on the package you go for.

I downloaded C cleaner mate. For a freebie its very good and I run it at the end of every night to clear off the shite that builds up.

Is it 32 or 64-bit? If it's 64 then the only freewrae firewall available is Comodo. It's excellent, firewall and antivirus in one, with auto-updating. They also do a 32-bit edition, but I can't vouch for it.

Spyware I run Ad-Aware and Spybot, both have resident shields. I also have SPyware Blaster installed. They're all free.

You may want to check the msconfig boot list. I did a long tutorial for Andy1672 a while back: viewtopic.php?f=25&t=3147&p=25955#p25955

Don't forget to defrag all the hard drives.

Ccleaner is probably the easiest to deal with. It might not be a miracle cure tho. For AV try Avast. Fast, free and good.

SteveD wrote:it's running shite and is very cluttered

If it's a few years old and running XP, then, depending how confident you are about fine-tuning (and depending how much time you have) there are a lot of good tweaks here:

XP Performance Tweaks

(Usual caveats about making a restore point, backup of the hard drive and keeping a list of changes made apply.)

Thanks guys! She's running xp on it at mo. I'm taking it to work with me today so I can let it do stuff over the course of the day. It's really quite old now, but so cluttered and slow it's untrue. She had a nasty virus on it yesterday posing as a virus checker, and when you clicked to try to get rid it was prompting to buy it, and enter credit card details! Got rid of that, but it took some doing!

Sounds like winantivirus2010. Nasty POS it is too. How much ram has the machine got?

Not sure how much RAM she's got yet Chopper (insert rude sister-in-law gag here..............................) - I'll have a tinker when I crack the laptop out later at the office and post here.

Just ran CCleaner on my own PC and despite doing regular scans with McAffee and deleting internet history etc I still had 1,650 Mb of crap lurking around! Good stuff indeed!

Now get Auslogics defrag and off you go. That should sort it.