Care and Feeding of a year-old inspiron 1720

Hi all,

Have a question about my wife's Inspiron 1720... It's about a year old, and starting to exhibit some general performance slowdowns, and she's asked me to find some solutions for her. I poked around the site, finding the 'optimizing a laptop' thread, as well as a few helpful threads in the 'for dummies' section (as I'm pretty new when it comes to computer care), but I wanted to see if I was forgetting anything.

Her complaints are generally that the computer seems slower, and specifically that Windows Internet Explorer will give an error message and unexpectedly close on her. (I forget the exact message, but I think it was a generic "Windows Explorer has encountered an error and must close" prompt, with no helpful info)


What I think I should do to try to help is:

1) Make sure Vista is up to date. (Should be, as autoupdate is on, but make sure)

2) Check for driver updates for her system.

3) Check specifically for updates to Windows Explorer.

4) Download a good defragger (saw one recommended on the optimization site) and run it to defrag and check the drives. (probably not an issue, as she doesn't have a lot loaded onto the computer, but still...)

5) Download a good registry repair/checker program (again, one recommended on the optimization thread) and check for registry errors.

6) Download a heat monitor and run it occasionally. (This one, I realize, won't directly help performance, as I don't think her stuff is heat related, but I'm thinking monitoring the system heat would give me an idea of if the vents/fans/heatsinks need cleaning. Plus, I'm getting my laptop in a few weeks, and would like some baseline numbers to compare to mine... )


A few notes:

A) I know a billion of you out there are screaming "DITCH WINDOWS EXPLORER!" - but it's not an option. My wife is intensly distrustful of ANY program, other than stuff she's familiar with, and so we're stuck with IE. (as a matter of fact, I'm going to have to work hard to convince her to give me permission to try steps 4 through 6 above, as she really doesn't want anything downloaded onto her computer....)

B) My liabilities are her distrust (see A) and my lack of technical skills. I can download drivers and check versions, but can't do anything really technical - so keep that in mind if you have a course of action to advise...

So, any thoughts? Am I on the right track with the above steps, at least initialy? Are there other basic maintenance type actions I should be doing for her, or anything else I've forgotten? Anyone have any recommendations for programs such as defraggers, scanners, or registry repair?

Any other tips or tricks on laptop maintenance would be helpful - like I said, I'm new, and not completely brainless, but very much in the 'wanting to learn more' part of my computer hobby...

 

Defrag and updates are definitely top priorities. Have you got rid of the Dell bloatware yet? I recently cleaned up a friend's 1720 (base config with dual core CPU), running perfectly smooth now even with a weaker and older CPU.

 

That's another step and a good suggestion - I did see some good cleanup tips on the optimization site, and will probably look into at least pulling what I can off. Again, my wife's pretty touchy - her comments amount to "Fix it, but don't actually DO anything to it... " :confused2:

 

My 1720 is exactly about a year and has never exhibited slow downs at all. But of course, I did alot of hardware upgrades to the max the chipset can handle. (See sig)

Software/OS optimizations are good. Make sure you do it hardware too. And yes, I defrag my two laptops every sundays to keep them top notch.

BTW, it's also good to do a re-installation of the OS once in a while.

 

if your hard drive has reached or almost reached max capacity, yea computer is gonna be slow as a snail.

 

I just did a clean install last month...works like new now!!!

Cin

 

Wait, you own a 1720 too?!

 

no, no no! lol..just the 1530 and mini 9! I should have said..I just did a Clean Install on my 1530 last month..I meant that as a generalization, that it helps to do one on all lappy's once in a while..

Cin