Windows XP Laptop

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Hi my friend is bringing over his laptop for me to help him fix it. He has a laptop with windows xp. His profile is okay, but his wife is getting an error message “windows cannot find local profile.” Anyone have an answer.

All I would do is restore the system back a few days.

Mystcal1 Thanks

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His wife’s profile is sounds as though it is corupted. You may have to create a new user profile for her and elliminate the corrupt profile. If this does not work then perhaps a repair install is in order, or a complete reinstall. It is possible malware or viruses have infiltrated that have done this damage. If this is the case a formay reinstall may be the quickest way to solve the problem.

I guess to summarize, this type of problem could be caused by more than one problem and many are difficult to repair and reinstalls may be a quicker way. If this is the final decision, then attempt to backup data (app data, favorites, contacts, etc) prior to the reinstall. Good luck!

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Thanks. He brought his wife’s computer over last night, and no one had answered me so this is what I did and it worked:

First of all 3/4 of his hard drive was full, so I removed any programs he wasn’t using anymore, then I did a check disk, and a defragmentation. I then restored his computer back to September 17, did a virus, malware and ccleaner scan. I freed up space for him and his wife and got her profile back from the restore. I also cleared the history, cookies and temp files.

No its running properly. However is is an old Dell laptop with Windows XP and only has 512 MB memory. He needs a new computer Whew!!!! what a mess lol

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I would not doubt that some nasty got into her profile and that moving back to an earlier time solved that problem. Did you show him how to get rid of all the temp. stuff you eliminated? With the limited resources, it must have been somewhat slow. Many people have no idea how to clean up their PCs. Once he has made the decision to upgrade to a new PC, that one may be a good candidate for some flavor of Linux for some experimentation. You might want to keep that in mind for “payment” for your expert time.

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I did show him how to get rid of temporary stuff, but all my friendsare computer illiterate; They bring me their computers and I do it for them because they don’t understand when they are at their computers, they are not gonna run fast forever unless they do maintenance, like a car. They just don’t get it. I ama computer help desk analyst, but I can’t find work. I never charge them because they are my friends and I hate seeing them bring it somewhere to be fixed and then they get charged $200

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