I’ve been working on the computer of an in-law and a woman who had a problem with not being able to view DVDs anymore and a slowdown in the functioning of her computer.
The problem of not being able to play DVDs was due to the fact that the software she was using to play DVDs was a trail version and expired after thirty days.
I’m surprised she didn’t have any software that came with the DVD drive that would enable her to play DVDs. Then again I haven’t ask her if she has a disc that came with the computer (a restore disc or something) but I doubt that she would since she was using a trail program in the first place.
Her system was infected with computer viruses. She wasn’t using an anti-virus program. I thought everyone new that if you used any Microsoft Windows operating system you need some type of protection from computer viruses (Unix and Linux users have less of a problem with this issue although they don’t get off totally free).
The mantra I give every user of Windows is try to update your operating system and computer virus detection program weekly or at the very least monthly (Microsoft only release patches monthly now - which is a bad idea).
Both my in-law and the woman didn’t have anti-virus programs. If this is common with many computer users I see why computer viruses spread so fast.
I guess everyone may forget to update things on occasion (I do sometime) but it is very important. You can schedule Microsoft and most anti-virus programs to automatically update daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
The slowdown in the functioning of the computer could be due to many reasons. The things I did or looked at were defrag, and cut off services that Windows XP Professional has on automatic or manual that could be security risk or were not being used and were unlikely to be needed in the future.
I will also look at the startup menu to see what is being loaded at boot up. Programs being loaded at boot up can slow thing down considerably.
I then will have to look at programs running in the background. To many programs running in the background can impact speed also. I do like tinkering with computers.