Originally Posted by
boguing
One thing that might be worth a try is to uninstall Firefox again and then get CCleaner to do a cleanup and then a registry clean. I usually do that duo two or three times as one seems to free stuff up for the other to find next time round. I'm just wondering if the rollback didn't actually delete the Firefox files and the FF installer found them and didn't bother writing over them thoroughly?
If that doesn't work, and I don't often agree with people that suggest doing a fresh Windows installation, but I think it may just be the easiest thing to do, especially since you've taken it back to near 'as new'. Get the SSD and it'll be done in no time. I can send you a Win7 disc if you haven't got one.
CCleaner (get the free one) here:-
https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download
Is there any (legal) way to download a copy of Win 7? I have an old 64 bit Win 7 machine that is behaving very like Andrews, and although I've cleaned out loads of old stuff, used CC Cleaner (I too, think that it's very good, BTW), it still runs slowly at times. I don't use it much, but keep it as it's the only machine I have that will run AutoCad (all the others are running Linux Mint).
Sadly the machine didn't come with any means of doing a truly "clean" Win 7 re-install, as it was originally heavily customised by Lenevo, with stacks of junk stuff that I got rid of, and the system restore option doesn't seem to be a clean install on a separate drive partition, AFAICS. I do have the original and correct Win 7 key, and quite like the idea of building a custom install with all the useful and essential updates slipstreamed in, but not including all the spyware updates (all the "telemetry" stuff that Microsoft added to Win 7 over the past year or two, via "optional updates", without giving details as to what the updates were really doing).
I wonder if one thing that could be slowing an older 32 bit machine, like Andrew's, down might be the overhead added by the "telemetry" updates? When I discovered that Microsoft had just sent these out without proper warning, I first got a bit angry, then spent a good hour removing a dozen or so "telemetry" updates and "customer experience program" updates, blocked all the offending Microsoft data collection servers on my router (there are around 20 servers collecting data from the various telemetry functions that Microsoft have added), cleaned up the PC and it did run noticeably faster. It may be that the extra overhead of sending all that personal data back to Microsoft might slow down an older machine, TBH I'm just not sure, as the slight speed up could be just because I used CC Cleaner after getting rid of a lot of stuff.