I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop with an IBM Travelstar hard drive running Windows XP Home that suddenly started working EXTREMELY SLOWLY. It was like running XP on an old 386 with 16MB memory. The computer has a 1Ghz CPU and 256MB memory. It took 10 to 15 minutes to open MS Word. Sometimes it takes 5 minutes for the menu to appear after I click on the Start button. It'd take it almost 15 minutes to boot!

I tried every fix imaginable and I finally determined that the hard drive is bad. I made this determination by "Ghosting" to a different hard drive and then replacing the suspect drive with the Ghosted drive. It runs great with the new hard drive. For whatever reason the old hard drive passed Dell's diagnostic program for this laptop, PC Certify diagnostic software and the IBM's "Fitness Test" hard drive diagnostics. I even did a low level format and a clean install of Windows but that didn't help. A replacement hard drive worked like a charm. I guess you can't always trust hard drive diagnostic software.

Perhaps it's possible for a hard drive to slow down because of mechanical reasons maybe due to bad bearings or something and maybe this doesn't get tested by drive diag software or "SMART" analysis. Has anyone seen this problem before?

Steve Smith

Steve Smith <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in
message news:OLGdb.28636$0Z5.19030@lakeread03...

> I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop with an IBM Travelstar
> hard drive running Windows XP Home that suddenly started
> working EXTREMELY SLOWLY. It was like running XP on
> an old 386 with 16MB memory. The computer has a 1Ghz CPU
> and 256MB memory. It took 10 to 15 minutes to open MS Word.
> Sometimes it takes 5 minutes for the menu to appear after I click
> on the Start button. It'd take it almost 15 minutes to boot!

The usual cause of that effect, particularly when replacing the
hard drive fixes that, is that the bad one is having problems
reading the data off the platters, but does eventually succeed
on retrys. That retrying slows things down very dramatically.

> I tried every fix imaginable and I finally determined that the
> hard drive is bad. I made this determination by "Ghosting" to
> a different hard drive and then replacing the suspect drive with
> the Ghosted drive. It runs great with the new hard drive. For
> whatever reason the old hard drive passed Dell's diagnostic
> program for this laptop, PC Certify diagnostic software

Yeah, those often dont notice retrys that succeed. Neither does scandisk.

> and the IBM's "Fitness Test" hard drive diagnostics.

Thats pretty sad.

Have you tried one of the SMART tools to
see if the drive has recorded lots of retrys ?

> I even did a low level format and a clean
> install of Windows but that didn't help.

How did the install actually go ? Was it noticeably slow to install ?

> A replacement hard drive worked like a charm. I guess
> you can't always trust hard drive diagnostic software.

Yep, no substitute for swapping hardware when it comes to the crunch.

> Perhaps it's possible for a hard drive to slow down because
> of mechanical reasons maybe due to bad bearings

It wont be that. It wont be rotating slowly.

> or something

Yep, most likely continual retrys which do succeed.

> and maybe this doesn't get tested by drive diag software

Yes, most of it doesnt test for retrys that succeed.

It would be interesting to see what the HDTach results are.

> or "SMART" analysis. Has anyone seen this problem before?

Yes, its something that the industry has been stuck with forever.

SMART should at least in theory have picked up
the problem. Have you actually got that enabled ?

Rod Speed"
> Have you tried one of the SMART tools to
> see if the drive has recorded lots of retrys ?

The IBM Fitness test said it was doing Smart Analysis at one point. I didn't try an SMART tools.

> How did the install actually go ? Was it noticeably slow to install ?

Yes, it was very slow, about 6 hours.

> It would be interesting to see what the HDTach results are.
> or "SMART" analysis....
> SMART should at least in theory have picked up
> the problem. Have you actually got that enabled ?

If I had the time I'd try HDTach but the drive is so painfully slow, it takes forever to install and run anything. There's no option in the BIOS setup to enable SMART. I don't know if it is enabled. How can I find out?

Steve Smith

Steve Smith <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in
message news:ZtNdb.29017$0Z5.14373@lakeread03...
> Rod Speed wrote

>> Have you tried one of the SMART tools to
>> see if the drive has recorded lots of retrys ?

> The IBM Fitness test said it was doing Smart
> Analysis at one point. I didn't try an SMART tools.

DTemp is very quick and easy to install. Be interesting
to see what it says about the SMART data.

>> How did the install actually go ?
>> Was it noticeably slow to install ?

> Yes, it was very slow, about 6 hours.

One very sick little drive...

>> It would be interesting to see what the HDTach results are.
>> or "SMART" analysis....

>> SMART should at least in theory have picked up
>> the problem. Have you actually got that enabled ?

> If I had the time I'd try HDTach but the drive is so painfully
> slow, it takes forever to install and run anything.

It shouldnt take long with HDTach, its quite small and installs quickly.

> There's no option in the BIOS setup to enable SMART.

OK, must be an older system.

> I don't know if it is enabled.

It wont be if it doesnt appear in the bios.

> How can I find out?

By looking at the bios setup. You've already done that.

"Steve Smith" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:OLGdb.28636$0Z5.19030@lakeread03...
I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop with an IBM Travelstar hard drive running
Windows XP Home that suddenly started working EXTREMELY SLOWLY. It was like
running XP on an old 386 with 16MB memory. The computer has a 1Ghz CPU and
256MB memory. It took 10 to 15 minutes to open MS Word. Sometimes it takes 5
minutes for the menu to appear after I click on the Start button. It'd take
it almost 15 minutes to boot!


You may or may not have seen an issue where after installing Q811493 the
machine runs extremely slow. What we have determined so far is that it is an
issue with the anti-virus on their machines. If the customer is running EZ
Trust they will need to disable the file monitoring service and if they are
running Norton they will need to disable the auto protect service and the
installation of Q811493 and this will return to system functionality to
normal. Other Anti-virus programs that seem to cause this issue that we have
heard of so far:

a.. EZ Anti-virus Realtime
b.. MacAfee version 7
c.. Sophos
While an MS spokesperson was not immediately available for comment Neowin
will
attempt to confirm the above workaround, which appears to fix one security
problem by compromising system security elsewhere (ie: no more
auto-protect).
People using the leaked SP2 update for Windows XP also reported problems
after
un-installing the patch which caused someone to re-install his
system!