[brainwave89]

I was helping a friend who has a Dell Dimension E520 w/ Vista Premium that is a year old this week. He was complaining that IE 7 was freezing up occasionally, his AOL 9.0 vr desktop software would freeze after he downloaded pictures and then tried to view them within the AOL interface. In the last few days it has frozen a few times on the Dell screen that displays his bios information as it starts up.
I ran CCleaner, spybot (found 1 item), trimmed a few items in the Startup and Services tab in Msconfig and even though I'm not familiar with his computer I wasn't happy with the performance after doing these things. Using Firefox was an improvement over IE 7 in performance.
It got me thinking, would it just be better not have done anything and suggested to backup the hard drive and re-install Vista after re-formating the hard drive?

What is your opinion on this? Is it better after a year's use to start from scratch or spend time trying to clean up things?
Thanks.

[Elvandil]

It's a lot of work starting over. It would be better to have a drive image from something like Paragon Hard Drive Manager 2008 that you could restore. An image created periodically and right after all the programs are installed makes it easy to pick a time when the machine was running as desired.

And Paragon can even boot from a backup image file (like Vista's bootable WIM files) in the "backup capsule" to make repairs to the OS.

If no planning was done ahead of time, it depends on how much damage you think there is. But it really shouldn't come to having to be reinstalled ever if the machine was properly maintained.

[Rich-M]

I would try some online scanners as what you used really is old technology and the AoHell software is little help....
www.bitdefender.com
www.ewido.net

[brainwave89]

Thanks Rich-M and Elvandil for your suggestions.

To all - what actions do you do in order to keep your Vista or XP box as fast and efficient as the first day you used it?

Cheers!

[Rich-M]

I would never recommend anything to optimize an operating system. Those utilities are what create the problems I'm afraid.