My friend has a desktop which he says is slow - he has hundreds of photos etc on it and he wonders if a portable harddrive to store them will speed up his computer. He has 1gb of memory - the computer is a Dell about 4 years old its Pentium 4 CPU 2.40 ghz - if that is any help!!!

I have thousands of photos and mine is not slow.

I would suggest downloading CCleaner (http://majorgeeks.com/download4191.html) (lite version - no Yahoo toolbar) and then IOBit Smart Defrag (http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.html) and see if that makes a difference. Both are FREE. :)

Tell him to back up the photos to a second drive (always a good idea to have an external backup).

Then wipe the computer and reinstall Windows.