Hardware problems?

[hugh_]

I've got a 2 1/2 year old HP laptop, its been heavily used throughout uni, it only needs to last another 5 weeks!

About a week ago it started being horrendously slow; it will still do everything, but it's just taken the best part of an hour to copy just under a gig of files from one partition to the other (normally slow because of read/write on same drive, but not that slow!) Programs still seem to load fairly fast, but it often skips if playing music (itunes) and loading IE6 or FF etc.

I know I haven't given much information, but can anyone shed any light on what may be the cause. Is it something a reformat to a single partition will solve, or something more sinister?

Cheers]
Hugh

[Zad]

Various things are possible. It may be that a stick of memory has come adrift and thus it only has half the memory space to work with. Another possibility is that the hard drive had defaulted to programmed I/O mode (PIO) rather than the much faster DMA.

Select Start/settings/control panel/device manager/IDE ATA Drive Controllers and make sure all the controllers are set to DMA (may be Ultra DMA)

It is worth doing an antivirus sweep and using AdAware or similar to look for any other nasties.

If you do start/run and enter msconfig and look under the startup tab, that should tell you what programs are installing themselves when you boot your machine. It is a starting place anyway.

[shocker-z]

open task manager, ctrl + alt + del and click processes click CPU and then click CPU again this has oprded with highest at the top, is there anything using the CPU constantly? Just rings a bell to SVCHOST issues caused by IE 7 and windows updates..

Regards
Liam

[hugh_]

Thanks for the replies, I've already had a scout through msconfig and counted see anything loading that I don't recognize.

shocker-z said:

open task manager, ctrl + alt + del and click processes click CPU and then click CPU again this has oprded with highest at the top, is there anything using the CPU constantly? Just rings a bell to SVCHOST issues caused by IE 7 and windows updates..

Regards
Liam

"System Idle process" is running consistently in the 90%, time for a more thorough virus/adware/spyware search methinks. Will report back in the morning

[ThePassenger]

hugh_ said:

"System Idle process" is running consistently in the 90%, time for a more thorough virus/adware/spyware search methinks. Will report back in the morning

That does what it says on the tin. 90% would indicate your laptop is 10% utilised doing whatever.
Kill/Uninstall IE7 unless your absolutley must have it due to the above mentioned issues.
Anti-Virus sweep. If you are using Norton/Symantec/McAfee home user stuff... just get rid of it. Google for guides on how to do this as their uninstallers will inevitably fail. Spring for nod32 or AVG-Free.
Malware, yep.
Defrag the drive.
Run a chkdsk on the drive.

Assuming 2k/XP, go Control Panel > Administrative Tools > erm... Event Viewer. Look through them for anything that indicates IO errors on a drive (failed write/failed read) that means your HDD is buggered.

It's unlikley that a memory card has come loose unless the actual SO-DIMM socket has failed due to excessively rough treatment. Right click My Computer and look at how much memory Windows thinks you have. If you have an IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor, such as Intel Extreme Graphics) subtract: 8, 16, 32 or 64 from the figure being shown, if it still doesn't look right you're not firing on all four.

Find your universities IT department, ask them if you can borrow a can of air duster (they should have one) and blast it in to all the air intakes, it is again unlikley but laptops will thottle back quite viciously when they begin to overhead... students aren't always the tidiest of people.

Poke around device manager, see if anything has suddenly appeared with an exclemation mark on it.

If you have a Campus/Dorm LAN system working... leave the laptop sat there... look at the HDD light, if it's flickering fast enough to give you seizures say hello to your neighbours... they've found your machine. Find their machines, deliver fresh Horse porn via google to them.

[hugh_]

Thanks for the advice, I went for the blunt option and reformatted, seems fine now.