My 7 year old Latitude x200 started running
very slowly a month or so ago. Then I started getting 'memory warnings'. Checking the C-drive, I found only 200Mb left. So I deleted a few applications and everything seemed fine.
Then it happened again. This time I knew that I hadn't added any new applications or even any new files - everything was on an external drive.
I had a look and found 2 culprits. One was Vodafone's 'vpclog' which hadn't self-deleted and was around 3Gb in bloat. The other? You guessed it - Norton Anti-virus.
After deleting the Vodafone crap, I contacted Norton on-line support and showed them the thousands of 'slu' and 'tmp' files with which their program had corrupted my computer. After 'some words', they used the 'Norton removal tool' and cleared all their junk off my C-drive, then gave me a gratis copy of Norton Anti-virus 2010 for the remainder of my subscription period. All of a sudden, the old x200 woke up and became as good as ever once again.
I now use it as a back-up (the lid has gone all floppy...
), having bought a nice new Vostro 3300 to use as primary. But it's still going well - all I have to do now is to get my old back up (Latitude D400) computer working again. If I power it up, it comes up with 'unmountable boot volume' and other geek-speak, so my god-daughter's hubby who is a City IT whizz has offered to sort it out as I still have all the system disks and Windows XP disks etc..... It was always slow - and I suspect that it, too, has been contaminated with Norton-bloat...
Pound to a pinch of poo that most 'memory loss' is down to an anti-virus program...
