wrmcclellan & JTTrain

[jroma1]

Gentlemen:

I greatly appreciate your combined help in solving my problem. You were right my C drive was (for lack of a better word) confused. I formatted the hard drive and installed Windows 7 again only this time with caution following the procedure step by step

Thanks Again

John Romano

[JTrains]

Glad to hear - sometimes, unfortunately, the easiest thing to do is simply start over when you have PC issues.

[wrmcclellan]

jroma,

Thanks for the feedback and glad it worked.

I have found with my aging Dell XPS 1210 (Vista) and my other PCs/Laptops (we have 8) that about every two-three years as the machine starts to operate slower and slower, that off-loading all the data files, reformatting (and in some cases simply replacing the HD with a larger one) the HD and starting completely over with a clean install makes the computer operate efficiently again.

So much software and operating systems end up with little glitches, memory leaks, many/many files (and file pointers and as JT notes changes to the registry) to access due to upgrades/file access, that the machine has to go to so many places to do the same operation that only required a few places in the beginning, that it invariably bogs down. And one glitch in the registry can be death. Again - this is a very simplified explanation.

The down side of clean installs is it is typically a 2 day process and you must babysit the computer the entire time as there are many windows that pop up during the process that require user input. The up side is the computer runs cleanly again.