I was recently given a laptop with a view to installing more memory. A simple enough job on the face of it, but it is only a Dell Inspiron 1200  and already has 512mb MORE than the original specs. Why on such a small machine would anybody want to upgrade memory to 1gb?

This little laptop is a ‘cottage’ machine, used by multiple members of a family during summer vacations and long weekends. The users are mainly the male members of the family, and they like to prove ‘macho’ by playing online poker. It is not just the younger members of the family who play, so the problems can’t be all put onto the ‘kids’. Each male has his own game preference.

The problem with free online gaming is that it is NOT free. Even when playing for cyber money only, there is a toll. The tolls are called ‘malware’ and come in the form of browser tools bars and search engines which will not go away.

So this little laptop, a budget model when bought was dogged with numerous toolbars, all running, over 200 assorted infections, and to cap it all, the actual owner of the machine was talked into speeding it up by the purchase of the UNIBLUE junk.

Uniblue added its own problems, and by the time it was given to me, it was pretty much at a standstill.

I know the family quite well.. and some of them know me because they have used my services before and for the same issues. Somebody isn’t learning very quickly..

With great delight, I set about improving performance, and the first task was to uninstall all of the toolbars. This gave me access to IE 8 which didn’t want to know when I first stated the laptop. Next to go were all of the online Poker games, and the finally the big prize, UniBlue and family.  Malwarebytes took care of the rest of the crap, and having installed MSE and run the XP updates, what was a perfectly crappy little laptop is now a respectable working computer again.

It will be returned to the cottage from whence it came, and before the summer is out, much of what I took off will return. Next year, somebody will suggest more memory and guess what? I will get to see it again for a couple of days..