This laptop (toshiba satellite 1800, ps181a-00wfx, 800Mhz, P3), runs windoze me… Customer would like it cleaned up & possibly upgraded to windows XP.

I take a look & given that it only has 64Mb of ram, I recommend upgrading memory by at least 128Mb, preferably 256Mb. The cost of also upgrading to XP & my fee will be fairly high, so I give the customer a few choices (and prices). He chooses to keep windows me, but to upgrade to 256Mb + 64Mb

So I order the memory & while waiting for it to arrive, I look at fixing windows me.

The first problem to fix is to remove a mild spyware infection.

The second task is to fix the sound (it should work, but it doesn’t… windows doesn’t report anything wrong, but there is no sound from the speakers). I was also told that the DVD drive doesn’t play DVD movies anymore, so it might be related.

To see if I can hear any sound from the speaker, I try to boot a few variations of knoppix, I even try “Damn small linux” and bart pe. But they all fail at some point in the boot process… looks like 64Mb is just too small for most OS’s.

At this point, all I can do an “in place” reinstall of windows me, and then the sound works just fine.

I then run windows update until the PC is fully patched, then I update antivir and spyware blaster, & scan the PC for any more nasties (none are found).

I also do a defrag & clear out tmp & cache folders (anything to speed things up a bit)

The DVD player is a lot more problematic. The PC already has powerdvd, & about 4 other DVD players installed, & none of them work. Most actually cause the PC to freeze, requiring a reboot… Quite time consuming.

In the end, I uninstall all the non-working DVD players, and I try installing JetAudio and media player classic. Both work flawlessly. I suspect the problem might have been a corrupt system file, so installing some different players (and removing the old ones) fixed things.

When the memory arrived, I installed it & it certainly made a big difference to the speed.

Another happy customer.