[quote=had a bit potter about with his sons Laptop,also a 1.8 gig CPU running XP but it seems to be running at a tenth of the speed of the desktop, any ideas what could be causing this?
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Try downloading CCleaner from
www.ccleaner.com It's very safe and the only thing to remember is that it will wipe all of your passwords and you will have to enter them next time that you use a web page. Have you got them written down?
For a defragger try a free trial from
www.diskeeper.com
Then find a Free Registry cleaner and run that.