What I did run into on many of those expert help pages were the conventional things. One, buy more memory. Yes, more memory will make a computer run faster but at one time this computer was fast with 1.5G of RAM. You also reach a point where more memory won't help anyway because you're not even using it all.

Another idea you find is to defragment the hard drive. OK, that's true too, programs and data will load faster if the files are all together rather than scattered all over the disk. But the drive was pretty much defragmented at this time anyway.

Another idea was to clean the registry. Now being a Unix/Linux type of guy I have no idea why there even is a registry when Unix systems don't have one. But what they'll tell you is that it makes a big difference. So I bought regclean and applied it. It came up with over 1500 errors but the computer was still just as slow. (By the way I discovered McAfee has some registry fixing feature too, it found 123 errors a week after regclean found 1500 and some.) It is interesting how many pages out there on the net dealing with slow systems and slow boot times want to sell you a registry cleaner.

Another idea was to not load unnecessary programs. The pages said fool around with msconfig to eliminate things you don't need. I managed to get rid of a couple of things but that didn't do any good either.

I had run out of things to tweak and I was wondering how Linux would perform on the laptop (Linux is free, FAST and highly reliable and does not need any virus protection) when I ran into a Linux page where the guy said that his system speeded up after removing dust because the dust made the processor run slower. I started investigating whether or not the Celeron M processor in the Toshiba A105 S1014 ran at variable speeds. It turned out it did, so that was the likely cause and the only thing left to try. What happens is that the processor runs slower when it is hot so that it will produce less heat. In fact if the processor is too hot the whole laptop just plain shuts off without any warning. A year before we tried cleaning the venting system using compressed gas (the one we used was called Dust-Off, you can find it at computer and office supply stores) and it seemed to help yet over time the computer simply ran slower and slower. McAfee must be really CPU intensive and that change pushed the computer over the edge to the point where it was almost useless. I found this page describing how to open up a similar Toshiba laptop and followed the directions.

Based on my experience it appears to me that the directions on the above page are more complicated than necessary for my wife's laptop. In particular it seems like (and I am not going to repeat the process to check to see if I am right):

• There is no reason to remove the hard drive even though that was quite easy.
• There is no reason to remove the memory even though that was quite easy.
• There is probably no reason to remove the CD/DVD drive even though that was quite easy.
• The WiFi chip is attached to a pair of wires, one black and one white that is on the OPPOSITE side of side of the motherboard from the system in the directions. So it is not convenient to remove it however you don't actually need to remove it. Just get the pair of wires out of their pathway so they are free so that in a later step you can rotate the screen 90 degrees without breaking these wires.
• You do need to unscrew the screen as directed and take out the cable that connects it to the base of the system so you can rotate the screen 90 degrees. You do need to remove the keyboard.
• You do NOT need to remove the DVD control cable, the speaker and audio cables and the touchpad cable.
• When you finally uncover the fan you will find lots of dust most of which you can remove with Q-tips and/or tweezers. At this point it is good to have some compressed air/gas around. Don't just blow on it with your mouth because some saliva could hit an important part and water and electricity do not get along well. Also don't use something like rubbing alcohol since it is 30% water. Just use some compressed air or something specially made for the task like Dust-Off.
• After putting all the pieces back the computer started to boot up normally and then it would crash and give error messages from various different programs. In the end I went into the BIOS setup (F2 while booting) and changed the display from "Auto" to the LCD screen. I find it hard to believe that just removing and re-inserting some parts could cause this, maybe there was something else I did earlier while nosing around the computer looking for a way to speed it up that caused this problem.

Your laptop may be significantly different than the Toshiba Satellites so you may have to adapt the steps to get to the dust. Hopefully your laptop has a better design that enables you to get to the dust easier. Maybe all you will need to do is to blow away the dust with compressed air/gas. Laptops ought to be designed to get to the dust without a lot of work.

By the way, this solution will NOT speed up your boot time. It still takes something like 10 minutes for the system to boot. One day I am hoping to run into an answer that will make the system boot as fast as the day we bought it, none of the conventional wisdom on the net seems to apply to this problem either. People claim that Microsoft did some cute things to speed up the opening of programs by pre-loading them at boot time but if this is true they certainly managed to slow down the booting time to an intolerable extent. I would rather have a faster booting process than have programs pre-loaded. My slower Ubuntu Linux system boots in 1 minute rather than 10.

Addendum 1: Another cause for a slow pc is wmpnetwk.exe spawned by windows media player. In the event that a media file is broken it goes wild and uses up CPU time, see for instance: Windows XP: wmpnetwk.exe keeps tying up my resources!!!. In our case the program was also producing 100M size dumps in C:\windows\pchealth\ERRORREP\userdumps and that was quickly using up disk space.

Addendum 2: One day I found a program apdproxy.exe using up over 90% of the cpu time doing God only knows what. It is a process coming from Adobe Photoshop Album. We don't have Adobe Photoshop. Or is a freebie that came with the original computer? And what could it be doing? I killed the process and used msconfig to stop it from starting up in the future.