Laptop has slowed right down

garcia

Hi I have a very strange problem with my sisters Sony Vaio laptop (celeron 1.4, 512mb ram, 60gb hd).

After about a month of use it suddenly slows right down - to snails pace. Boot up alone takes 5 minutes. The sound stutters and mouse is sometimes unresponsive - both due to sluggish processor speed. The slow-down seems to coincide with hard-disk access. Its barely usable at this speed. Strange thing is when doing a software speed test it shows up as normal. Also no process is hogging the cpu either.

The exact same thing has happened 3 times now (over a period of 15 months). Each time about a month after she started to use it. I found no spyware/malware and did a reinstall from the laptop's reinstall partition which (temporarily at least) fixed the problem.

Has anyone got any ideas? I'm at my wits end trying to figure this one out!

Many thanks,
Garcia.

Aliktren

Could be some wierd software that times out after a month trying to do something in the background ? ? - you say you've checked for spyware, but what about a virus ?

Also, have you tried defragmenting the hard drive?

Did you try using a site like PC Pitstop to get the PC checked out ?

alex2796

type msconfig on run then check on the startups, services etc. and have you done a clean up since you had it? hope it helps

garcia

Where is Browntoa when you need him!

skiddy2k

alex2796 wrote:

type msconfig on run then check on the startups, services etc. and have you done a clean up since you had it? hope it helps

+1....
click start>run>"msconfig"... click the "startup" tab and untick anything there which you dont need to load at startup.

You say no process is hoggind the CPU... (i presume you're looking at TaskManager)... is there any programs which are using hogh memory (signaficantly more than others)

Have you installed anything recently?

How many Antivirus and Antispyware programs have you got on your PC? which ones?

garcia

skiddy2k wrote:

+1....
click start>run>"msconfig"... click the "startup" tab and untick anything there
which you dont need to load at startup.

Already done this. Just loading firewall at the moment.

You say no process is hoggind the CPU... (i presume you're looking at TaskManager)... is there any programs which are using hogh memory (signaficantly more than others)

Nothing is hogging the cpu, although the System Idle and other percentages often total more than 100%. E.g. one prog might be using 60% resources, but system Idle is apparently at 80%. (I don't know if this normal for some processors)

Have you installed anything recently?

No

How many Antivirus and Antispyware programs have you got on your PC? which ones?

AVG is antivirus - I've turned it off and no difference.

Antispyware I had spyware doctor which has been turned off too. No difference though.

One important piece of information - I ran chkdsk and it takes ages, then gets stuck at 73%. Could this entire thing be a disk problem? Is it possible for a system to only break-down once the disk has reached a certain size, then for for disk access to crawl to snails-pace?

Many thanks for your help,
Garcia.

skiddy2k

I'm stumped... dont know the problem i'm afraid, could be that your HardDrive/laptop has overheated at one point, resulting it becoming unstable?

SystemIdleProcess taking up a high proporton of CPU is normal... it shows how much free CPU your PC has... constant low CPU (for SystemIdleProcess) is an issue... that'll cause a slowdown.

Try to defrag your HardDrive, doubt it'll make a big diffrence, but worth a try.
How much free space have you got on your HardDrive?

Browntoa

Diskkeeper has a feature to help you laptop boot faster. Diskkeeper can also defragment your harddisk

also

Slow startup could be caused by many things - here are a few to try: -

1. Check you are using the correct up to date driver for your Graphics Card - this can cause this sort of delay.
2. Delete the contents of the folder C:\Windows\Prefetch. This partly loads programs you use frequently but if you uninstall something it takes time as it tries to find it. Files in here can also become corrupted or have poor links which again can take up time.
3. Download the free (for 30 days) version of Tune-Up Utilities from www.tune-up,com and run

a The Disc Cleanup

b The Registry Cleanup

c The Registry Defrag

d Startup Manager - see what programs load on boot. You can disable a lot of them that are not needed - for example you will probably a lot of programs trying to load on startup. Adobe Acrobat tries to load programs as does Nero and several others. Just uncheck the box next to programs that are not System programs.

e System Optimiser.

4. When you have done this cleanup it is time to Defragment the hard drive -

Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disc Defragmenter. I suspect it will take a while to run on your Vaio as it has a lot of work to do

GoldenEye

garcia wrote:

Hi I have a very strange problem with my sisters Sony Vaio laptop (celeron 1.4, 512mb ram, 60gb hd).

After about a month of use it suddenly slows right down - to snails pace. Boot up alone takes 5 minutes. The sound stutters and mouse is sometimes unresponsive - both due to sluggish processor speed. The slow-down seems to coincide with hard-disk access. Its barely usable at this speed. Strange thing is when doing a software speed test it shows up as normal. Also no process is hogging the cpu either.

The exact same thing has happened 3 times now (over a period of 15 months). Each time about a month after she started to use it. I found no spyware/malware and did a reinstall from the laptop's reinstall partition which (temporarily at least) fixed the problem.

Has anyone got any ideas? I'm at my wits end trying to figure this one out!

Many thanks,
Garcia.

This also happened to me a couple months back! I have a Sony Vaio laptop and I am not sure what caused it but I do think it's related to a virus/trojan. It deleted the "Sony HOTKEY utility" from my computer and I subsequently could not use the hotkeys but I managed to fix it. I didn't want to do a full system restore from the Sony disc and this is what I did:

1) Firstly, check to see if your hotkeys are working (e.g. "FN" button and "F3" etc.)

2) I have System Mechanic Pro 6 installed and Memory Mechanic showed that my RAM had decreased to only 30MB!
Press CTRL+ALT+DEL and press the "PROCESSES" tab first to make sure nothing is "hogging" the memory. If something looks odd and it taking up too much memory, google it and find out why.

3) I had zonealarm installed on my laptop. I uninstalled zonealarm and my laptop seemed to work fine after (I later re-installed zonealarm). I also uninstalled Ulead VideoStudio 9 and most other programs I had installed. I recommend you do this one program at a time and later reinstalling them.

4) A virus (cannot remember it's name) managed to get on my computer and attached itself to "EXPLORER.EXE" causing Windows to crash frequently. I used Spybot S&D and it scanned and deleted the virus but the sneaky parasite replicated itself EACH time! I used a program called "Trojanhunter" that finally managed to eliminate it.

I hope this helps because I was one day away from calling in a computer expert or buying a new laptop!