I've just discovered that my computer has two versions of Windows XP Home Edition running. How do I go about deleting one of them ?

How do you figure out you've got two versions 'running' can you enlarge on that ?

Your PC must be very, very slow?

If you can expand on how you found out you have 2 versions of XP on as Mr I says

Apparently when we took our computer into a local shop to get checked out (no I don't know which one it was), they installed another copy of Windows onto the computer. Now when we switch the computer on, we are prompted as to which of the two we want to use. And yes the machine is very slow.

Bin it and buy another.

They're cheap as chips nowadays.

Problem solved.

I will accept cheque or cash.

They've just reinstalled windows and done it badly.
You aren't running two versions, you just have two versions installed. Only one of them will be running at any given time.

As for running slowly, thats usually down to a number of things;

too many unneccesary background programs running. Pretty much every piece of software reckons you need to run it at startup - you don't. Run msconfig and uncheck the ones that you don't use every day.

Are you running two different anti virus programs? If you are it will have a tragic effect of the speed of your machine.

Keep your spyware and anti virus up to date.

Defrag the hard drive

Install and run CCleaner (its free)

What memory do you have installed? its dead cheap nowadays and upping your installed memory has a dramatic effect on speed.

On The MSCONFIG Front :

To get that to load in XP

Go to Start > RUN and Type msconfig

Click through the tabs and have a look at whats loading and clear any un-needed apps from the list

How do you know what the un-needed ones are though?

They usually have strange names, Not associated to your common programs

But what are the common programs?

And like Mr Dibbler says, how do you know?

You need to be a bit careful because some of them control essential services. To start with get rid of all the obvious ones like Nero, Acrobat, MS office, ipod stuff, and any other that is obviously related to software you don't use. After that google each description. I can't give you a definitive list as theres tens of thousands of programs out there.

But I use Acrobat, MS Office and Ipod stuff?

And I don't know what Nero is?

Its a space rocket

http://www.tasklist.org/ is a good place to search for the services used on your machine

As Mr I says though, Be careful on what your unticking, I do believe you can save a backup copy of your MSCONFIG, So thats reccomended when your doing this

Maybe you do but do you use them all constantly? Maybe only allowing them to take up system resources when you want to use them is a better option than having them running in the background all of the time.

I had a bit of a mess about in msconfig yesterday, following the instructions given. The tasklist site is very useful for this. The commy certainly seems to be responding much better, it's only taken me a few minutes to read up on the latest posts, probably would have taken half an hour before. I think that there could well be more I can do, on the Windows Task Manager there are 40 processes running at the moment, it was 60 odd yesterday, before I start 'unticking' in msconfig.

Sounds like I almost know what I'm doing.

There you go Mr BP, glad we can be of assistance.

I never fail to be amazed at the money people spend on software to speed up their computer when the tools you need are already there.

Next step, spend a few quid on some more memory, cheap as chips now.

Excellent, Glad to know its working to a reasonable extent