parents just don't understand

December 18, 2006 12:47 AM

aol optimization on the parental computer...

i'd bet 80% of you have the same experience when visiting parents: "it was working well after the last time you visited, but it keeps getting slower..."

what i know:
1) aol must run on this machine
2) aol must run on this machine
3) avg free and clamwin claim it virus free
4) spybot found some cookies and nothing else
5) system memory is 512, but i will bump to at least 1gb
6) win xp home sp 2 on a 2.8ghz p4
7) aol 9.0 optimized 'revision 4156.5036 provided by dell' is installed
8) dad says "ever since aol decided it had to fix everything, it keeps getting slower"
9) aol must run on this machine
10) i nothing about aol

what i need to know:
what advice can you offer (save the 'ditch aol')? will a reinstall of aol clean things up? will a reinstall make things worse? is there a optimal configuration of aol that will make it play nice? is there a piece of software made to either clean aol sludge or config it to make less mess? any advice along these lines is welcome.

happy holidays

posted by mdpc98 to technology (12 comments total)

Check out ProcessExplorer. It is a program by SysInternals (that Microsoft recently aquired) that shows you exactly what processes are running as they execute and can be extremely useful for tracking down problems such as this.

Goto run, type MSCONFIG, goto Startup tab.
See what is starting up and disable all non-crucial applications.

Download CCleaner and try that. (not anti-spyware it just deletes unnecessary temp files and fixes registry errors).

Do they have a firewall? If not, enable the Microsoft one. (not the best protection but it is easy to use and seems to cause the least conflicts from my experience).

Defrag.

If the problem doesn't go away and you still think it is malicious try HijackThis.

In all honesty though, I am not sure how much better it can get. It's only a matter of time before the anti-bloatware/spyware programs start recognizing AOL and flagging it as a malicious intruder.
posted by sophist at 3:42 AM on December 18, 2006

Goto run, type MSCONFIG, goto Startup tab.
See what is starting up and disable all non-crucial applications.

Be careful with this. Do them one at a time, and reboot and do quick runthrough of common tasks before moving on to the next one. Disabling services willy-nilly will often cause unexpected things to stop working, and having to backtrack to try to figure out which service you shouldn't have disabled is a pain.
posted by Doofus Magoo at 4:00 AM on December 18, 2006

go through the 'install/remove programs' system application in control panel. get rid of anything that shouldn't belong there. look for toolbars, and other useless crap that can add up to deletion. in my experience, people like aol users tend to load up on all kinds of useless crap, like weatherbugs and so forth.

look in the system tray, and get rid of anything useless htere (except for the aol stuff). make sure the machine is running the latest version of aol.

make sure the root hard drive--the c drive--is at least 1/3 free, with more then 1 gb total space free.

run regclean. kinda old, but it's free and does the trick without being anything more then it needs to be.

oh, and i've never been a fan of spybot or any other anti spyware program. i'd dump that and get windows defender. i'm sure there are going to be others that say this is bad advice, so take it for what it's worth.
posted by lester's sock puppet at 4:56 AM on December 18, 2006

It's also possible that AOL has a lot of crapware set to startup with the computer. You can disable that and still leave AOL installed. First, check the system tray and adjust the settings on any of the AOL software that you can; then edit system startup programs using Spybot or some other program.
posted by markcholden at 5:14 AM on December 18, 2006

My advice is completely remove AOL, and reinstall from the AOL website. They have a new AOL piece of software called Openwave I believe, which is supposed to be less bloatware.

Doofuss Magoo's Suggestion is also very good, that is where I start on my parents computer.

An option would also be to install firefox for browsing or alternatively get them upgraded to the latest IE7 unless all their browsing is inside AOL
posted by imjosh at 5:17 AM on December 18, 2006

It would be good if you could pin down exactly what 'slower' means. That could be 'loading all programs is slower', which is what everyone is assuming and making suggestions for). It could, however, also be 'aol is slow'. That can be caused by any number of things: noise on the phone line if they're on a modem, or dsl or cable problems if they're on broadband, or provider issues. A malfunctioning DNS server, for instance, can make the whole network feel slow as heck, even though the network itself is fine.

What can really help you troubleshoot is to have your parents actually DO the things that are slow, and try to indicate how fast they expect them to be... that may give you a good idea of where to look for problems.

If it is crapware/bloatware, which really is the most likely thing, you may end up having to reinstall. I keep having to rebuild my mother's computer because she insists on believing that downloaded programs are okay. I may finally have her straightened out, but it's been kind of a yearly ritual.

Your planned memory expansion will probably also help a lot, particularly if they've added a lot of programs. Once you have the system running fairly well, a disk defrag doesn't hurt, and will usually give a small additional performance boost.
posted by Malor at 7:01 AM on December 18, 2006

AOL AntiSpyware sucks huge donkey balls (and several kagillion CPU cycles). I think by now they've moved on to McAfee, but just in case, a clean reinstallation of AOL may help.
posted by Xoder at 8:30 AM on December 18, 2006

Anti-virus/ spyware from AOL isn't bad actually, it's based on Kapersky. http://www.activevirusshield.com/antivirus/freeav/index.adp?
Plus, it's branded AOL, so the 'rents will like it.
Other advise, run a defrag.
posted by defcom1 at 10:50 AM on December 18, 2006

And when you are done with all the deletions and cleanups recommended above, defrag the hard drive. Not only will this overwrite any bits of viral cruft, but it should theoretically optimize anything that needs to look at the HD. And that includes virtual memory.
posted by ilsa at 10:55 AM on December 18, 2006

Open up the case and dust it thoroughly with canned air. You'd be surprised how much this can help a computer that "keeps getting slower" when nothing else works.
posted by hilker at 11:33 AM on December 18, 2006

i have tweaked the startup list and checked out the running processes. actually, i will admit that aol seems to be doing a pretty good job of keeping the machine virus and spyware free.

the next step is a reinstall of aol.
posted by mdpc98 at 12:24 PM on December 18, 2006

defragment? I just did that on my machine after a long period of neglect, and it's worked wonders. I used a trial version of O&O.
posted by lowlife at 7:14 AM on December 19, 2006