[AntBully]

My daughter has a laptop that is almost maxed out (85%) and runs soooo slow. She doesn't have the money for a hard drive right now - She was talking to her girlfriend and finds that her brother is a computer "expert." Apparently he is going to school and built his own computer. So he looks at my daughter's laptop and downloaded a program called SpaceMonger and deleted a lot of things. She is running a little better but now she cannot use IM and surf the internet at the same time. If she is surfing the net and signs on to IM she immediately gets bumped off the internet and can't get back on unless she logs off IM. What's up with that? - Has anyone ever heard of such a thing? Now he is suggesting to reformat her hard drive - Not something she wants to do since backing up all the photo's she has on it would take a stack of CD's - Any suggestions?

She has a DELL Inspiron 6000 using XP with a 40 Gig hard drive and was using IE 6 and Fifrefox - Updated to IE 7 but no change. Since it happens with both browsers I didn't think that would really help.

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How do you mean maxed out by 85%? Do you mean the hard drive is 85% full?

In which case the only real resolution to that is either delete lots and lots of stuff, or buy a bigger drive. Windows is known to slow down when doing anything when the drive gets to more than 50% full. Alternatively you can invest in an external drive that you plug into a USB port and store important stuff like photos, documents, etc on there.

As to IM (I presume you mean MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, those types of programs), you have to be connected to the internet to use these otherwise they wouldn't sign in at all. Therefore you can't get bumped off the internet and stay logged into MSN/Yahoo.

[Neil Jones]

How do you mean maxed out by 85%? Do you mean the hard drive is 85% full?

In which case the only real resolution to that is either delete lots and lots of stuff, or buy a bigger drive. Windows is known to slow down when doing anything when the drive gets to more than 50% full. Alternatively you can invest in an external drive that you plug into a USB port and store important stuff like photos, documents, etc on there.

As to IM (I presume you mean MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, those types of programs), you have to be connected to the internet to use these otherwise they wouldn't sign in at all. Therefore you can't get bumped off the internet and stay logged into MSN/Yahoo.

[AntBully]

Yes Neil, by maxed out I mean 85% full - but that issue aside, she doesn't get bumped off the internet because she could still use AOL IM and MSN Messenger - The strange problem is that she cannot browse the internet while on these chat programs - When she tries to bring up the browser she get an error message saying the page cannot be displayed - This happens with IE 7 and FireFox