Old lady's dying laptop had 14 toolbars, she just wanted her photos

Had a client last Tuesday bring in a 2009 Dell that took 20 minutes just to boot up, turns out her grandson loaded every browser add-on you can think of and she never noticed because she only clicked the blue icon on her desktop... I spent 6 hours removing junk, backing up her pictures, and putting a solid state drive in it, and when she saw her family photos load instantly she actually teared up a bit. Has anyone else dealt with a machine so buried in bloatware that the real issue was never the hardware, but the person's patience with the person who installed it?

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nathan_kim16d ago

Grandson probably thought he was "helping" by installing every free toolbar that promised smiley faces and weather widgets. Classic case of a kid who knows just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to realize he's slowly strangling the machine. The real villain here isn't Dell or Windows, it's the Ask Toolbar and its cousins that keep multiplying like gremlins. Six hours is honestly heroic, most people would've just said "time for a new laptop" and watched her grieve over lost memories. Hopefully the grandson got a stern talking to, or at least got banned from the house for a few months.