What Happened to my Laptop?

almacmil

From Monday AM through to about 4 this PM my laptop has been hanging like crazy!

Fine on bootup and for about 10 mins, then it would sloooowww down and then take forever to load any page or program. As it slowed down the hard drive would be continually working away, but with a regular rythmic sound. When the page free'd up this sound would change.

Now it's fine!!!

It's an HP Omnibook, xt6200, on XP. Ran Spybot, Microsoft beta and CCCleaner in safe mode on Monday - nothing. Any ideas?

(I know it's working now, but is it a recognisable fault and will it recurr?)

Ta in advance.

albertross_2

You didn't mention if you have a virus scanner? Is your PC patched with windowsupdate?

This Microsoft site does a fairly comprehensive check on your PC

http://safety.live.com/site/en-US/center/howsafe.htm

How much RAM do you have, it could be swapping/pageing due to insufficient memory.

If you can go into task manager (CTRL ALT DEL), look at the processes, and see which one is hogging the PC.

Or Download this

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html

and this.

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Filemon.html

and this:

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Regmon.html


They will tell you exactly what is going on at any one time.

almacmil

Thanks albertross,

I've got Zone Alarm (sorry forgot to mention that), and haven't updated yet. (Iwas trying to download the SP2 and other updates on Mon AM when this slow down started - so I restored to a point the day before after download.)

RAM is 512Mb.

I checked the processes during the slow period and the only one running was system idle at 99%.

It is running fine still........

Gollom

Is your system set up for automatic updates from Microsoft? It could be that there are a lot that you do not have and it is downloading them. Look for a little orange shield in the system tray which allows you to install the items downloaded

Hope this helps

almacmil

Gollom wrote:

Is your system set up for automatic updates from Microsoft? It could be that there are a lot that you do not have and it is downloading them. Look for a little orange shield in the system tray which allows you to install the items downloaded

Hope this helps

No Shield but then I did restore. There were 13 updates but it took almost three hours on Broadband to download!!!

darktrader

Don't forget the obvious...

Run scandisk - full - autofix problems. Reboot once it's finished then run defrag