-=PCTechTalk=- Re: A little assistance on a tech support call

Thanks for all of your responses. It's kind of a funny story when I went over 
there. As soon as I connected to go online, everything was running normal as if 
I had the "magic touch." LOL! But last night (well, now two nights ago) it was 
running pretty slow. As I asked him a few questions as to what he  did with his 
PC the night before to isolate and find out what the problem was he had so it 
can be prevented from happening again, it turned out he did a defrag of the 
drive and emptied his IE cache, which of course, makes the pages you go to 
previously a tad slower because the cache needs to be recreated again with the 
stored website stuff to make the sites load quicker than the last time. I'm 
sure most, if not all, know about that. (If not, let me know and I'll send you 
a pretty good Smart Computing article about it because I don't think I can send 
it as an attachment on the list) Also, since he has an HP Pavilion PC, I 
disabled some of HP's so called unneeded "crap" (unless any of you use it then 
it's not bad at all ;-)) which bogs down the system, like that "HP Center" 
thing on the top of the screen with the clock and stuff and also in the systray 
(now called "notification area" in Xp) which, when clicked on, pops up some 
kind of ad. I am using an HP Pavilion PC myself so I have nothing against them 
except for their tech support, which I'll post in another message because it 
still bugs me. A couple other things were the basic "MS Office" flag thing in 
the Startup folder in the Start Menu and AOL's tray icon which is not needed 
since he does not use AOL anymore. 
Thanks again for all of your input. If any of you in the St. Lucie, Martin, 
Vero, and West Palm areas need some 1-on-1 training or other assistance, feel 
free to let me know anytime. I'll be more than happy to help!

Later,

Justin Rocque -
Dragon PC Training & Consultant
    www.dragonpctraining.com

<You pretty much hit it on the head, regarding spyware. I think the majority
of the slowdowns for a "dial-up" connection come from hidden spyware and
line noise. The spyware is pretty easy to check, with SpyBot and possible
even Ad-Aware. The line noise, the best way to go is with a little device
that plugs into the jack (which can be purchased cheaply at radio shack, if
you don't already have it). I know you asked if there's anything else to
check, and I can't think of anything as of now, but just wanted to throw in
a little feedback.

---Troth>

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