[Albert Lionheart]

Tales from the toolroom - dealing with a slowcoach
I had a little jolly to darker Rothwell today to deal with a slow laptop. Not only did I find the whole boot process really slow but trying to get the browser running took an age. The machine is a 2.8Ghz Celeron laptop with 512Mb RAM and a 250Gb HDD
I cleared all the dross out of the temp folders but no real improvement, even after installing Firefox as well.
A grope about in the task manager showed a modest 38 processes running but something was keeping the CPU very busy even after it had settled down after the boot. Two processes in particular were head of the list of CPU and RAM greedy activities; Nero's indexing service and something called Rapport. As the client had changed to using the iPlayer CD writer we binned the Nero Installation (this index service is bundled with Nero 7) and after a reboot noticed a big improvement in response. The Rapport thing was still very busy and as the client had no idea where it came from a quick Google found it to be some sort of on-line banking security package (Online Banking Security | Trusteer) - client had no record of this and does not use on-line banking (how very sensible!), so we binned it. After a reboot it was like a new machine - problem solved and a happy punter.
We'll see how he gets on with it now but maybe add some RAM later.
Conclusion of this little tale - Rapport may be a super bit of security software but what on earth was it doing on this machine and how did it get there? Stranger things happen at sea, peeps!