Since it's working well enough to backup to external, I think she should take the nuclear option straight off. She'll still have to delete a ton of data manually, still have to defrag over a night or two... still have to buy or download a better defrag app than the one that comes with XP. (I like O&O Defrag.)
This sounds like "normal Windows build-up" slow-down, but it may be worth downloading the TestDisk bootable CD which does a pretty thorough scan for hardware errors. Also run MemTest86+ for a couple hours and see if you get a lot of memory errors. There's not much point re-installing Windows, if it's choking on bad RAM or a faulty hard disk.
Google says Win 7 will run on that laptop and I recommend the upgrade, although only slightly. If you've got the time to relearn the UI a little bit, definitely give it a try; if you need to get things running ASAP to get work done, maybe don't bother.
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This sounds like "normal Windows build-up" slow-down, but it may be worth downloading the TestDisk bootable CD which does a pretty thorough scan for hardware errors. Also run MemTest86+ for a couple hours and see if you get a lot of memory errors. There's not much point re-installing Windows, if it's choking on bad RAM or a faulty hard disk.
Google says Win 7 will run on that laptop and I recommend the upgrade, although only slightly. If you've got the time to relearn the UI a little bit, definitely give it a try; if you need to get things running ASAP to get work done, maybe don't bother.