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Thanks everybody for your advice.
It’s great to get this kind of support to fix a problem.
In the meantime, I’ve had the computer now for three days and it’s almost ready to go back to the owner.
For anyone interested, here’s what I found and did:-

1) On starting the computer I found that the HDD was almost full (It’s a 40 GB drive with about 4 GB recovery partition)

2) I made an image of the C: partition and stored in on her external HDD.

3) Used several free software utilities to check for rootkits, and other malware.
To finish off, I used Malwarebytes to purge the system of what it defined as undesirable stuff.
There didn’t seem to be anything really nasty.

Used CCleaner to get rid of lots of temp and other trash files.

4) Made a list of all the stuff installed on the computer, and consulted the lady owner about which items she normally used, and which could be removed. There was a lot of stuff installed years ago by her late husband, so I had plenty of items to remove.

5) The computer has 1 GB RAM – seems to be OK for what she will be doing. Monitoring with Process Explorer shows that RAM is rarely used at more than about 50% level. However, it does show that the processor is often maxed out at 100%, especially in the first couple of minutes after boot up. This seems to be mainly caused by the AVG antivirus installed, but this slowdown can be lived with.

I have installed xxcopy and set up a small batch file she can use to backup the contents of her “Documents and Settings” folder to her external HDD, just by double-clicking a desktop icon.
This is a blunt instrument, but will save the stuff that’s important to her, including Outlook Express mailboxes.
I’ve also suggested she buys a second external HDD for additional security (not being dependent on just one external drive), and backs up twice a week, using them alternately.

Had to re-install Office 2007, as it wasn’t behaving properly (fighting with Word 2003, which I had removed)

6) The computer is quite useable now. Not lightning fast, but it’s an old machine, and I think it will be as good as it’s ever been. Now about 7 GB of free space on the C: partition, which should be OK for the time being.

Again, thanks everybody for your ideas (especially as you persuaded me to give up the idea of doing a clean install and setting up everything from scratch).

Regards,

John S

PS – what I now need to research is whether I can safely get rid of some of the stuff in c:WindowsInstaller.

There’s about 8 GB of files in there. Don’t know what they are or how to identify them or discover if they’re still needed.
My own Windows XP computer has only about 34 MB of files in that folder.

Hi DrWho,

Yes, that makes sense. I do something similar with my own computer (Win XP).

I back up a dozen folders every day (including Documents & Settings) using a batch file and an archiver (Power Archiver) which can be run via command line. Before backup I open up a nice little file manager (XYPlorer) where I have eight tabbed folder windows permanently on display showing the contents of various cache and temp type locations. I empty these manually and take an interest in how much rubbish I have collected.

Cheers,

John S

Thank you,

John S

Thank You, DrWho.

I haven’t picked up the computer yet, but I’m now thinking that I might try to fix up the existing installation to start with, depending on how badly mangled it is. Apparently others have had a go in their own well-meaning way, and I don’t know what has been done.

I intend to make an image of the partition before I do anything else, then I can always restore everything back to existing condition if things go wrong.

I guess, if the computer can be made more responsive, that will save many hours of reinstalling and configuring, so it is worth a try to start with.

Thanks for the offer of help. If I need it and make another post, will you be watching this thread for a while?

John S

Thanks for the suggestions.

I have downloaded double driver.

Won’t do anything about the 60 day trial of clickfree until I get the computer to work on.
I may not need it though, as I will be making an image of the system partition, and I will be able to mount the image later if I need to recover any files I’ve initially forgotten.

Will still keep looking for the detailed procedure of how to do the job though, as I’m sure I’ve seen it somewhere.

Thanks,

John S

Ronny said:-

Change Thunderbird folders
I am using Thunderbird 3.1.7. For sometime, I have had the Local Folders set to D:Thunderbird. This morning, for no reason I could tell, it was reset to:

C:Documents and SettingsrrichardApplication DataThunderbirdProfiles2vrihik9.defaultMailLo cal Folders

***********
The sudden change in behaviour may be because ThunderBird has automatically updated itself and altered the setting to the default.

Once you have fixed the problem it may be wise to disable automatic updates.

Tools > Options > Advanced (on toolbar) > Update (tab)

You can choose to turn off automatic updates for ThunderBird and/or add-ons.

John S