So I've had my laptop for about a year now, and this is the 5th time this has happened.

I've had to reformat my hard drive too many times, and I'm getting sick of it. Here's what happens:
I reformat my computer, install all but the XP base system and windows updates, VS2005, Office 2007, and a few little extra apps. Everything works just fine for about a month or two, and then I get the slowdown.

The slowdown means the cpu light on my hard drive is staying solid lit. Disk access isn't necessarily slow, but accessing certain things is unbearable. Not to mention startup from cold takes about 3-4 minutes (sitting at the Windows Loading screen). Music slows down the system the most, dragging out one second to about 30 (and it's really choppy).

I've run hard disk scans: chkdsk, seatools, and I even have IOBit Smart Defrag running in the background optimizing (And I know that's not the problem because it's done it 3 times before I installed IOBit). It slows down so badly that the only thing I can think to do is reformat, and I've done that 5 times so far.

Is there anything I'm doing wrong? Out of all the computers I've ever worked with, this is the only one I've ever seen this issue with.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

(At any rate, I worked out a deal with the place I bought the laptop from and I'm upgrading to a 160GB 7200rpm drive for updating their website. So we'll see if it's the hard drive or how I'm running it in a week or so.)

When you reload the OS on it are you using the disk from the laptop manufacture? It usually contains a load of bloatware and almost all of it is set to run at startup. Add the programs that you install to the fray and there's plenty there to slow you down

Start>Run>msconfig>Selective Startup>uncheck load startup items, apply click ok. Restart your comp, tell windows to quit whining when ya get the popup manually start up your antivirus/firewall and it will be the only thing that takes it upon itself to start.


*edit for nowcrappy keyboard messing with my spelling*

It's a completely clean install of XP Professional, MSDN version. There's nothing else running that I haven't put on myself.

And even so, I'm running with 2GB of memory that I installed myself (That's not the issue, because I had to reformat twice with the original memory too).

Right now I'm running the command "sfc /scannow" and it's going through the system files. I'm trying to rule everything out software-wise, so I know it's hard drive issues and not something I put on it.

I would take a hard look at what is installed...and running constantly.

Any programs which purport to back up the system continuously...running indexing...using System Restore...scheduled AV scans...scheduled malware scans...programs like Symantec's Norton series...and any/all startup items would be my initial focus.

And...then there's malware possibilities.

You can use Task Manager to see what processes/applications are running when you perceive a slowdown, that should provide some bona fide clues.

Louis

That's the thing. Task Manager doesn't show anything at all out of the ordinary. I even ran HijackThis! and didn't find anything that was weird. I take good care of my computer, I'm the only user, and I know suspicious activity when I see it, and I don't see anything other than an extreme system slowdown which isn't reflected in the CPU or memory usage.

Autoruns shows nothing weird either. AVG has never had a bad report. I'm pretty sure if I ran a malware scan it'd come up with 0 entries.

*One more thing - I don't have internet at home, so I rarely do any browsing on this thing. And I use this laptop for work, so the browsing that I do do is for help with Visual Studio*


I'm this close to a reformat. Everything's backed up. I know that a reformat will fix things, but for how long?

Sounds pretty strange...when you run chkdsk, you are running chkdsk /r, right?

Without the /r or /f (included in /r), all chkdsk does is read, doesn't fix anything.

Louis

Of course. I started running it at noon and it didn't finish until 5. It found not a single error. I guess it ran slow because the disk has been doing so for no reason.

I'm going to reformat tomorrow. It'll be a temporary fix, because I'm getting my new hard drive later this week.

5 hours to run chkdsk /r on a laptop hard drive?

Either that's an extremely large partition...or that drive has some problems that took time to work around. Usually (in my experience) that's a sign of bad sectors and data having to be moved from bad to good sectors on the HD.

Keep us posted...

Louis

My first thought was bad sectors, but


The drive is only an 80gb. I did a full format and reinstall of XP Pro w/sp2 and it's running better than what I thought was running well.

I'm getting a 160GB 7200RPM drive this week. Hopefully this'll be the permanent fix.

Heres a few dumb questions for you that I didn't see asked.

1. Are you keeping your computer defragged?

2. Is it overheating at all?

If not try a different HDD if you have one laying around. Or check your processor because that could be bottlenecking your computer.

I'd run the manufacturer's long test on it...after getting the new drive and moving everything from the old.

Louis

I use a program called IOBit Smart Defrag that automatically defrags when the usage is below a point. I know the program isn't causing the problem because the first few times the slowdown happened I didn't have it.

I also have a cooling pad that I use that has fans on the base and it keeps the laptop relatively cool.

My processor is an intel Core Duo @ 1.7ghz. It could be bottlenecking, but I've used systems at minimum requirements for XP and they still run faster than this thing has been.

hooray for new issues!

The DVD drive isn't working.

All this adds up to a possible motherboard issue. I'm going to talk with the place I bought it and see if I can't get this all resolved.

Even with a new hard drive, I can't install anything without a disc drive.

Keep us posted...

I don't ever advise anyone to buy laptops, even though the mobility aspect is great for many...too hard to troubleshoot issues which can be easily remedied on desktops.

Louis

CD/DVD drive is replaced and works now. Not mobo issue.

Funny thing was that a drive of the exact model, brand new, didn't work. Did the same thing. Had to install a used one at the shop and replace the faceplate to match the form of the laptop case.

Hard drive's not in yet - will be soon, and I secured a copy of Symantec Ghost through a friend who works for the company. Hopefully the slowness will stop when we install the new drive.

I got the new drive and installed it. Symantec Ghost worked perfectly and I was back up and running in less than a half hour.

I haven't had any problems yet. I installed Vista alongside XP things are working well.

So we'll monitor everything and make sure nothing funky happens. If something does though, then I'll be able to discount the hard drive.