Extremely Slow Laptop

[Me__2001]

i was down at my GF's and one of her house mates asked me to take a look at his laptop so i agreed stupidly

its a dell inspiron 1300, celeron 1.4Ghz with 2GB of RAM that i upgraded from 512MB, its runnin XP but it is unbelievably slow, it takes roughly 5 mins to get to the xp loading screen and the little bar that goes from side to side actually stutters, the startup sound is all jerky and stutters, i think the overall startup time is nearing the 10 min mark!!!

once you're actually into XP, the windows change like normal due to the RAM but actually opening programs takes forever and playing mp3's is pointless as they stutter every 15seconds or so

i did the full run through for adaware, spyware, viruses, and couldn't find anything, ran ccleaner and removed a load of crap also cut down the startup list to 6 things which hasn't really made a difference so i'm thinking that the HD may be buggered or has a load of errors on it?? haven't actually scanned it for them as i ran out of time but its been bugging me as to why its so damn slow

any help would be good

 

[muckshifter]

This strikes me as a faulty CPU.

Check the CPU's onboard cache ain't been disabled in the BIOS ... if it has not been disabled, do so, and reboot ... if it is still slow or you can't tell the difference, then you just found the problem.

I would expect to see BSOD's with a dicky HD ... is the HD full?

Is all the ram being seen correctly? Pop one stick out and then the other, is there any improvement?

 

[Abarbarian]

This has tools that may help you find the problem . It can run of a CD or a USB stick . Its a fairly small download .

http://www.sysresccd.org/System-tools

 

[Me__2001]

thats not what i wanted to hear mucks, i was hoping it was something simple and cheap

from what he told me it has been dropped a couple of times off the side of a bed but thats after it started to get slow which is why i suspected HD errors

the HD has 20GB free of 50GB, it gets defragged weekly and he's had no BSOD's that i know of, will ask him about that though to make sure

RAM is being seen correctly in XP so dont think thats the problem, but will try with just one stick to see if that helps

will look into the BIOS as well, i did think there may be some sort of CPU throttling goign on but running CPUZ didnt show any chang in clock speed

thanks for the tool AB, i'll have a go with that, i was also going to take my copy of hiren's boot cd but might have something extra on it

 

[Me__2001]

ok, i'm on the laptop in question right now


i've run tests on everything using this dell diagnostic tool and everything has passed, i've also used the UBCD and found nothing wrong!?

so i'm really stumped as to why this thing is still so slow, the time to open applications is reasonable now but its still having problems with playing back music from the hard drive

i've defragged it, not that it needed it and stripped down XP from all the stuff it doesnt need

anything i've missed? i'm really having issues with this one

EDIT: i think i might have sorted it, just changed the power settings to always on and now its flying lol

 

[Me__2001]

have a quick update on this, i did a read write speed test and compared it to my GF's laptop which is basically the same and found that the thing is rediculously slow, it took 40seconds to write a 10MB file! also the CPU is only running at 1Ghz instead of 1.4Ghz and i cant change it in the BIOS as its all fixed!

the BIOS on my GF's is locked as well so it must be something common to the inspiron laptops? this isn't a BIOS password, more the settings cannot be changed??

cheers again guys