Restore Computer Performance with WinPatrol
Our house laptop has been mysteriously slow for a couple months, and I’ve tried a bunch of things to speed it up, including: removing extraneous files, defragmenting, check disk, virus check, and checking the wireless network speed. All of these efforts to no avail. At this point, I suspected extraneous background services were sapping this system’s resources (RAM) and I needed a tool to help discover them. Based on some web research, existing recommendations point to WinPatrol.
I downloaded WinPatrol free version from Cnet’s download.com (as you know, it’s my favorite place to learn about programs) onto this laptop. After the install I eagerly anticipated finding a lurking service, and to my dismay, everything looked okay. However, when I clicked on the ‘IE Helpers’ tab I found a malicious looking browser-helper-object (BHO). I had to do some web searching to find out that this was surely a bad-guy. (Alternatively, you can purchase the WinPatrol Pro version for $24.95 that gives you access to their database of information and recommendations about which programs to remove). After I was sure I wanted that BHO out of there, I used the ‘remove’ function from within WinPatrol. And what a relief! We are back surfing the internet at blazing speed! I’m a new raving fan of this product. If you’re interested, I also located on Cnet this brief instruction on how to use WinPatrol.
Next task is to get WinPatrol on my father-in-law’s laptop to tame his system tray!
Best Wishes, Brett
