Help with slow laptop

Robinhood

Hi folks,

This is a follow on to an earlier post - Help with parents PC - which turned in to help with my sisters laptop! It used to be painfully slow in every aspect, take ages to boot up, then takes ages to load the user settings. Once it has done this, it is really slow when surfing the net. It's better at the moment surfing the net but still slow booting.

As well as all the basic stuff, disk check and defrag, I have followed alienric's advice in the afore mentioned post. As that did not cure it and the advice ceased I decided to transfer everything on to one account and deleted the other. It then begun loading the user settings without being prompted, so I turned the guest account on in case it was due to being the only account and not having a password but it still does it. I have also removed as much crap as possible including utility programs that I downloaded following advice from previous post. As I final measure I also removed avast!! I hear screams of shock horror!!! The reason I did this is that I think I'm getting close to the stage of reinstalling xp, unless any saving advice comes from this new post.

Originaly, looking at task manager there are 79 processes. Other info:

Physical memory (K)
Total 1046904
Available 251604
System Cache 390104

Kerpel temory (K)
Total 74624
Paged 43188
Nonpaged 31428

Totals
Handles 16646
Threads 676
Processes 78

Now it is as follows:

Physical memory (K)
Total 1046904
Available 639560
System Cache 299196

Kernel temory (K)
Total 61324
Paged 32588
Nonpaged 28736

Totals
Handles 11996
Threads 529
Processes 53

The laptop is a Dell Inspiron I6400 with a T2250 @ 1.73GHz, 1Gb RAM running XP.

Some funnies on the laptop.
On loading settings, when it plays the default sound it crackles.
In the system tray, the wireless symbol has red cross over it. When the mouse hovers over it it says No supported wireless adaptors available in the system - yet the laptop is connected to the internet via wireless!
It normally comes up with 2 program not responding - close now error mesages when closing down but I've just closed it down to get the programs details and it hasn't done it this time!:eek: Just tried again and one came up - ZCfgSvc.exe

I've still got hijackthis on there so if you require a fresh log let me know. Thanks in advance.

Cheers.

closed

I'd bite the bullet, backup data and restore to factory settings using the restore partition

See if removing the battery and running on mains only makes a difference first.

Does it have nvidia graphics?

disable ZCfgSvc.exe running at startup using autoruns, see if your wireless connection still works

Robinhood

What is mbam?

busenbust

Robinhood wrote: »

What is mbam?

he is referring to the excellent malwarebytes :cool:

http://www.techspot.com/downloads/4716-malwarebytes-anti-malware.html

^if needed ^^

Robinhood

closed wrote: »

See if removing the battery and running on mains only makes a difference first.

Does it have nvidia graphics?

Tried this and the only difference seemed to be in the resoloution of the graphics - large icons covering the whole desktop - bit like safe mode only it doesn't say it. Second thoughts, its definately running a lot slower.

Not sure about nvidia so am trying to look at device manager but it is taking forever!

Robinhood

closed wrote: »

I'd bite the bullet, backup data and restore to factory settings using the restore partition

See if removing the battery and running on mains only makes a difference first.

Does it have nvidia graphics?

disable ZCfgSvc.exe running at startup using autoruns, see if your wireless connection still works

Finally got there, it shows ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 for a display adaptor.

It also shows the battery as working properly although it is removed!

Where do I find autoruns?

The_Grandmaster

As others have said run malwarebytes. Download Malwarebytes Anti-Malware 1.46 - FileHippo.com
Download and Install. Go to UPDATE tab, CHECK FOR UPDATES. Then run a QUICK SCAN. Remove anything it finds and post log here.

closed

http://live.sysinternals.com/autoruns.exe

Robinhood

closed wrote: »

disable ZCfgSvc.exe running at startup using autoruns, see if your wireless connection still works

I've just tried doing this but ZCfgSvc.exe is nowhere to be seen in the list.

closed

O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [IntelZeroConfig] "C:\Program Files\Intel\Wireless\bin\ZCfgSvc.exe"

Robinhood

Time for an update I think.

Before doing autoruns system was rebooted, without battery and graphics booted normally. ZCfgSvc.exe disabled using autoruns and laptop rebooted, again without battery. Graphics normal again. Wireless symbol with red cross still in system tray and internet still working via wireless connection.