iano

Hallo again.

My girlfriends 4 year old Dell laptop, Penthium 4, 1.66 Ghz (if I recall correctly). Its running fairly sluggishly on XP. She was running 256mb ram so I added another 512 but it hasn't made a whole lot of difference.

I tried a registry cleaner which improved things a little (using ccleaner - although I see a sticky up top which says registry cleaners aren't recommended :( ), a HD defrag, switching off Norton just to see.., turning off unnecessary start-up stuff. To little to no avail.

I was thinking reinstalling XP might be the best thing to do next. There are no Dell discs with the laptop but I know someone who works at Microsoft so can get a new copy of XP for peanuts.

Is it possible to reinstall using a non-Dell XP disc? Is it fairly straightforward for someone who is a little PC savvy? There isn't lots of stuff to save on the HD so a complete fresh start might be just the ticket. I have discs printer/camera/ Norton/Office which I understand would need reinstalling too.

Is there anything else I should do in addition to the reinstall?

Thanks in advance

Ian