Any businessman would tell you it’s a fool’s move to give away what you’re selling but I think it’s more important to educate people about proper computer use than me making a few bucks on the side with freelance tech support gigs. Here is a receipt from a typical freelance job:
Hi XXXXXX,
Here are the changes I made to your laptop and it is definitely running much faster now:
I uninstalled Google Desktop, ALOT toolbar, Ask toolbar, 10 old versions of Java, the MSN toolbar, Yahoo! toolbar, and the Carbonite backup tool. When you install things like Adobe Flash or Java, I highly recommend unchecking any toolbars or software that come with them. I recognize many of these things as recently being bundled with the common tools. They’re not needed and just lead to bloating the computer.
I turned off a number of things that were starting up automatically with Windows like Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger. This should speed up the PC because there are fewer things running in the background all the time and will definitely speed up the time between booting up your computer and being able to use it.
I updated Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, Mozilla Firefox, and Java to their latest versions. I also ran Windows Updates. This step is important as it will protect you from lots of malware that will take advantage of bugs in older versions.
You had both McAfee VirusScan and an old version of Avast! running. Having more than one antivirus program can actually make your computer less secure because they’ll block each other from working properly. They also consume a lot of resources (CPU and memory). I uninstalled both and installed the latest version of Avast!.
I ran Ccleaner which cleans up temporary files and the Registry.
I ran MalwareBytes which found 22 infected objects meaning you had a few trojan viruses and adware running in the background. MalwareBytes is used to scan for and remove malware. It’s still on your computer and you can use it to run a scan on your laptop whenever you think you might have gotten infected with something. Because there were active infections found on the computer, I would recommend you change the passwords to any accounts (e-mail, online banking, Facebook, etc) that you wouldn’t want somebody else to have access to.
I also ran Disk Defragmenter. After removing all the things above, it had a lot more free space to work with and it optimized the hard drive for faster access times.
I hope you see a noticeable improvement in the computer. Let me know if you have any questions.
-Jason Hamilton