New hard drive or reformat?

I was asked by a friend / coworker to look at their computer. They have a windows vista hp computer they put ram into it and an external. It now has 5 gb of ram and his computer is still outrageously slow. It turn out his 250 gb hdd is split into 2 partitions a partition called back up that takes up 80 gb and is full and his c partition that has the 170 gb left but has only 25 gb of free space. I assumed this was the culpret for such slow speed since everything else checked out. He had a dual core processor above 2 ghz. We moved every uneeded file over to the external and it had no effect it only freed up 10 gb and computer was still slow / unreponsive. My question is what should I do? He asked me if i could fix it Im assuming I can. Do I a. Buy a new bigger hard drive and install vista b. back up his files on external and do a clean install on hdd he has now (I dont know how to put the backed up data on the c drive...) or c. is there a way to delete the partition called back up and move its backed up data to the external so that there is free space on the c drive and it should speed it up? Oh and I checked for virus's I didnt find any.

I wouldn't think that 25 gigs remaining on a 170 gig C partition would be a major issue.

Questions:

It's slow. In what way? Booting? Processing a video file? Saving a random Excel file?

Did it only recently become slow?

Have you looked around in task manager to see how many processes are running and what apps are using RAM?

Have you looked at the startup tab of msconfig to see what starts up automatically on a fresh boot?

Does the hard drive pass diagnostic tests?

I do not have his full IT specs with me. Also its slow in everything boot up i timed at 45 min and over every time i booted *5 times* If it ever went to screen saver it would freeze and id have to get to task manager. Saving files are not possible the pc stops responding. The computer has progressivly gotten slower until now where it is hard to do anything. It takes over 20 min to look at the process's page and its has arouns 100-150 process. theres about 10 programs on start up and disabling every uneeded program still doesnt effect boot up time. It baffles me theirs no virus or anything and its just ungodly a slow it takes hours to get anywhere. I checked the hard drive for anyfaults and did not find any im confused. I just assumed installing a new os would be better.

Over 100 processes is out of hand. I usually have about 40.

Look at processes again and rank them by RAM usage.

What are the 4 or 5 things at the top of the list and how much RAM are they using?

i would copy any data that he needs from the ( c: drive ) make sure he has the vista disk so you can reinstall it.
when the screen asks what drive to install on i'd delete the ( d: drive ) putting it back to just one drive and then reinstall windows vista.

hope that helps

scrooge

Which specific anti-virus and anti-malware tools have you used? I'd certainly try several of them as none of them is perfect. A bad dose of something can even prevent your tools from running.

Alright first things first . I planned on just redoing it all on monday but form what you guys are asking me maybe I should just see if I can take his computer back home with me for a couple days ( its unsuable anyways.) ignatzatsonic- I took a coupel virus's off his computer a couple months ago and it sped up but not much. I have malware bytes on there and avast free version. I have not had a problem finding a virus with those programs but if you have an idea. I will put that program on when I get a chance I will call him in the morning and see if I can pick it up and play with it tom.

Well, if you can work on it for a day or two, it might be easiest to just reformat and start over.

But...........a couple of key points:

You have to determine yes or no if the hard drive and hardware generally are OK.

You have to make at least an informed guess of what was going on. Otherwise the user is going to keep up with possibly bad habits and end up in the same situation 3 months from now, after you have reinstalled everything.

An ordinary home user who has over 100 processes running and has a slow PC with 5 gigs of RAM likely has bad habits and isn't doing any proper maintenance.