My laptop essentially has been causing all sorts of trouble. It went through a phase where it had trouble maintaining a connection with the home network only. That problem just randomly ceased to exist.
All was well for about 2-3 weeks before the laptop began to run slower and slower. It has now gotten to the point where it barely operates and often does not actually even operate. It will freeze-up. A simple boot-up will take nearly 10 minutes to complete.
My virus scanner is AVG and is up to date and reporting no viruses. I’ve run Ad-Aware (which took the better part of a full night to complete) and that found nothing. I was given the advice to run CCleaner, which I did. I ran the registry and all that. Fixed all the “problems” but it still is running terribly. I also disabled a bunch of programs at startup to try to limit how many programs were booting up. Nothinghas helped.
The laptop is a Compaq, few years old.
-Windows XP Home SP3
-Intel pentium M processor 1.50GHz
-478MB RAM
It ran quick enough for it’s use up until a few weeks ago when it started to lag, and it just seemed to get worse and worse as time has gone by. The laptop is just used for school work (word processing) and internet browsing. Nothing intense by any means.
I am far from a techie but does anyone have any ideas? Will a system restore do anything for me? Or am I stuck with needing to clear her completely and start over fresh again?
Figure out how many gigs of files you need to back up. Then buy either a flash/thumb drive or an external hard drive. Copy files over, download some essential drivers (video driver, all network drivers) and make sure you have an XP cd and product key.
Then boot from the XP cd and follow the instructions…
I can help if you’d like. I’m not too expensive and a bunch of NYspeeders have brought me their stuff before
I will diagnose the issue prior to doing any major work, to ensure you don’t lose your stuff. Hopefully your hard drive isn’t failing, but I can get you another one and fresh install while hopefully saving your stuff (Hard drive failures = no fun.)
Google search “memtest” and go to the Memtest+ link. Find the ISO file (*.zip) and download it. Burn it to a CD using the “Burn Image to Disk” option and boot off of it. Check if the memory is OK. (RED=bad. Watch the “PASSES” to go from 0 up to 1 or 2. If the screen stays blue, your memory is OK)
As for a hard drive check, I use a purchased copy of spinrite. It lets me know how the drive is. I’m sure you could probably find a hacked/stolen/etc. copy on the internet to create a CD with Use that to check the status of your hard drive.
If it’s windows related, Start->RUN-> MSCONFIG Turn off everything from startup and see if that helps. If it did, it is probably some type of software that you’re running causing the slowdowns/issues. Perhaps you don’t have enougn memory?
CTRL+SHIFT+ESC at once to open Task Manager. Check Physical Memory vs. Commit Charge. Physical Memory example: 2096624 (2GB RAM) and if the Peak/Total number under Commit Charge > Physical Memory, you’ll see slowdowns. You need more RAM.
umm… that’s all I got at the moment. A good start though
So I just went for it and figured, nothing to lose so why not. Did a system restore to over a month ago. Seems to really have perked up the thing (IE - it is usable once again. Real question is, what the deuce caused this mess and how can I avoid it happening again?
Only if the problem was the software you’ve installed since. A system restore removed installations that may have occurred after the spot you chose to restore from. It won’t fix any hardware problem, only the software.
Like I said, try the MSCONFIG option and turn off all programs that start at startup and see if that dramatically helps at all.
Also see if you can find spinrite online and download it. It’s a great way to read the SMART stats of your hard drive. If you have ECC errors, uncorrectable errors, read errors, etc. it’ll be able to tell you.
So, it’s either software related or hardware. Did you check your memory usage like I also suggested? You may have too little RAM in the thing
I doubt it’s too little RAM if the laptop used to work fine. Yeah, the various SP’s of XP have increased RAM use a bit but not to the levels that would stop it in it’s tracks like this. Sounds to me like classic OS creep. You keep installing and uninstalling stuff and eventually everything gets so bloated it’s just time to reformat and start over.
My laptop got the same way after about 3 years. So slow to boot it was almost unusable. I tried AV scans, and adware scans, and optimizations, and uninstalling stuff and disabling startup items and services… eventually I formatted it, installed a nice fresh OS, and everything worked like the day I got it. Better actually, since it was a Dell and the day I got it they had already installed a bunch of trialware garbage. Had I done the format to start with I wouldn’t have wasted nearly as much time.
I also doubt it’s a hard drive starting to fail because you don’t mention getting lots of errors. When a drive fails things don’t just slow down, they start crashing a lot.
Use that to check the status of your hard drive.