Slow laptop even after reformat and less than 50% load. - by Yakoob
Yakoob on 1/5/2012 at 19:59
Things have gotten unbearably slow on my laptop, so I decided to completly reformat and reinstall. I enjoyed the super-lighting speeds for about a day before reinstalling just a few necessary programs and everything is back to a crawl. You know, hit "minimize all" and it takes a few seconsd for windows to close; open My Computer and it takes a few seconds again. Open Control Panel and all icons show as the little white squares, and take a second or to to "load up." You can imagine how tedious changing windows/tabs is as well.
This is 100% not a spyware/virus issue (fresh install + already tested). I wouldn't be surprised considering my laptop is some 5 years old, BUT staring at the TaskMan / Proc Explorer shows that all my resources are well below max. My Specs:
HP Compaq NX9420
Intel 1.9GHz Dual core
1GB Ram
ATI X1600 256MB
100 GB Fujitsu MHV2100BH (52GB free)
WinXP SP3 Pro (running classic theme)
Current Open Apps: Chrome (2-5 tabs like FB/TTLG), Notepad++, Skype, Winamp, AVG or Avast (I used both, same thing). At this point, my memory is at 750mb and my CPU doesnt go higher than 25% on both cores. And yet, it chuuuugggsss...
Also other installed programs: Windows Update to latest (SP3), Daemon tools, winrar, Silverlight, Office and of course all the drivers (
I havent even installed DX / .Net / Java / QT / Flash / Acrobat / etc. yet, so the system is really fresh.
Anyone idea wtf this might be? My only other guess is that it could be my HDD giving out, any idea how I can check for that (I can look at the IO byte reads/writes and cache misses in proc explorer but honestly, they dont tell me anything :/ )? Like I said, if I was maxing out my CPU or Mem I would just toss it as "old crappy PC" but it's not that, which is what really boggles my mind. Also, maybe being on my new monster machine spoiled me, but I dont think my laptop used to be AS slow a year or two back. Which, again, makes me thinking maybe failing hardware. Or maybe the new iterations of Chrome/Skype have just become that much bloated (memory-wise they definitely have, but still I am not maxing out so I dont know wtf is this slowdown) .
Al_B on 1/5/2012 at 20:35
Have you checked the properties of your hard drive controllers in the device manager to make sure they're in DMA mode? XP can drop your drive down to a lower option if it detects problems. The latest version of defraggler also has some drive health data and although I don't think a defrag will make a huge difference in your case it might be worth trying.
The 750MB RAM usage figure does sound a bit high. I'd expect closer to 400-500MB for a fresh install with chrome and notepad++ open.
Yakoob on 2/5/2012 at 20:40
Quote Posted by Al_B
Have you checked the properties of your hard drive controllers in the device manager to make sure they're in DMA mode? XP can drop your drive down to a lower option if it detects problems. The latest version of defraggler also has some drive health data and although I don't think a defrag will make a huge difference in your case it might be worth trying.
The 750MB RAM usage figure does sound a bit high. I'd expect closer to 400-500MB for a fresh install with chrome and notepad++ open.
Well, Flash plugin is notorious for leaking memory (it routinely climbs up to 1 gig, at which point I restard chrome with the same tabs and holla Im back to like 600MB).
how do I check DMA mode? I check properties of the HDD in the device manager but didnt find anything related.
And interesting link on the powersupply; I'll try unplugging next time I see slow downs and see what happens.
Al_B on 2/5/2012 at 21:38
Quote Posted by Yakoob
how do I check DMA mode? I check properties of the HDD in the device manager but didnt find anything related.
You need to check the properties of the controller, not the hard drive.
Yakoob on 3/5/2012 at 19:42
Hmm yep both channels set to "DMA if available."
Had a weird episode today that I thought killed my laptop; was watching NetFlix when it suddenly froze, tried alt+tab / task man but everything was running super slow and finally bluescreened. Then, it wouldn't start windows. I'd just get the blinking underscore in top left. "Crap". After 2-3 reboots I got the SafeMode/SafeMode With Online/Start Normally screen and when I chose either it would start loading, quickly bluescreen and reboot.
I put in my linux live thumb and tried mounting the HDD but getting errors. "wtf" Finally it did mount but showed a warning saying "run checkdisk!"
I rebooted and now it works fine. I ran chkdisk, did the BIOS HDD self-checks, everything is fine and dandy.
Wtf. I think it is my hardware slowly giving signs of giving out. Only question, which hardware? I still think it's the drive but you never know...
heywood on 5/5/2012 at 03:08
If you look at the System event log in Event Viewer, are there any disk errors? I've sometimes seen bad block errors in the System event log when a drive is dying. Another clue is seeing unusually high drive activity (LED) while the Windows Resource Monitor app isn't showing a lot of disk I/O. That's an indication the drive is trying to re-read bad sectors over and over. Hard drives start life with a percentage of sectors held in reserve, outside of stated capacity. As sector read & write operations fail the drive controller marks the sector bad and reallocates the data to a reserve sector. It does this internally and transparently to the OS, so sometimes everything will seem good again for a while until it really goes bad. If I see just one bad block reported by chkdsk or the event log, the drive is binned because all the reserve sectors are used up and I figure the drive is probably well on its way to rapid failure.
Anti-virus software also seems to cause a lot of pauses and slowdowns, especially that McAfee shit. But given the filesystem corruption, I think it's your drive.
Yakoob on 7/5/2012 at 04:46
I already checked the log and nothing there. Not even when it BSOD which is weird (it normally does put something there). And the HDD led seems to correspond to disk usage so far; I guess I'll just have to wait and see.
EDIT: And the same episode repeated, with the LED being constantly on as the computer froze and BSODed with KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR (Stop 0x00000077). I have a bunch of "The driver detected a controller error" and parity errors in my system log. I think I need a new hard drive :/
