laptop sudden slowdown

Hi, my son's relatively new (May 04) Sony Vaio laptop model k15, has suddenly developed problems. History:
-It's got XP home on it.
-last week he ran norton win doctor from the norton systemworks 2003 CD. He had run win doctor the same way several times over the past month with no incidents. This time, after it ran:

-the shortcuts on the desktop no longer refer properly to their app in some cases; in others, the apps load slowly.
-everything runs slowly. Till this happened, he had a fast laptop.
-he tried to run system restore, but there were no restore points.

the Vaio comes with a drive restore software, but I am reluctant to have him try it, fearing everything will be zapped. What about the software that came with the Vaio that is not part of Microsoft win XP? Would that be zapped using Sony restore?
Any other suggestions?
Thanks.

 

Does win doctor have a "reversal" function? In other words can it reverse something it has fixed?

 

Thanks for replies, Mr. Jones & Mr. or Ms. Moore:
1) I dismissed viral attack, but I'd been having 2nd thoughts anyway. I'll have him do that (check for invaders).
2) Unfortunately, when running win doctor from the CD (uninstalled), I believe that there is no undo history (you CAN go backwards, good suggestion, if the undo hist. was there).

 

Hello larkin,

What about the software that came with the Vaio that is not part of Microsoft win XP? Would that be zapped using Sony restore?
Explore (right click context menu) the restore disc and see what's on it. It sounds very much like a "factory" restore - meaning that it resets the system to what the system was when recieved by your son - pre-loaded applications included.

If it's just the OS, then there also should be seperate discs for the applications that the machine came pre-loaded with. I just don't know what Sony does in this regard.

There should be some documentation provided from Sony about this kind of situation.

Regards - Charles

 

You might try a system rollback. Roll the system back to a point before the slowdown happened.

I dont think this will help in the case of a viral attack, though.

 

Hello neonhomer,

Not an option in this case.

Regards - Charles

 

Sorry, didnt see that! I was looking to see if that was the case or not....


With my laptop, I had a similar problem with my laptop. When it slowed down, I had went and did some house cleaning, removing temp files, defrag, etc etc..


I definatley recommend the spyware scan, as that could be a big issue.