Win 7, Poor Performance

Father Ted

Father Ted

Father Ted

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I have a Dell Inspiron 1564 laptop with Win7 Home Premium 64 bit installed.
Since last night I'm experiencing performance issues with it. For about 15 minutes after booting up the HDD is thrashing constantly, the whole thing is running at a snail's pace, programs take an age to load and then I get 'Program Not Responding' when they do finally open and try to use them.Task manager shows CPU usage doesn't rise above a few percent. I've tried using the resource monitor to see what's causing all the disk access but it won't open until the HDD activity has ceased.
I have MS security Essentials installed.
Any ideas folks?
 
How much free space is available on the hard disk?
Try memtest from boot to check the memory.
 
Once it settles down, does it behave normally? There could be something loading with Windows that is causing the problem.
 
SiriusB said:
Once it settles down, does it behave normally? There could be something loading with Windows that is causing the problem.
Click to expand...

It seems to behave normally most of the time but it can still run into problems. For instance last night it had booted up and eventually settled down. I played Torchlight for about half an hour with no problems, when I tried to exit the game I got thrashing HDD and slow performance again.
 
I'd guess that the hard drive is knackered

What make is it? I'd run the manufacturers diagnostic tools on it.

In the meantime, order a 320gb WD blue drive as a replacement
 
HDDs are normally accessible on a laptop. Check for flaps on the edge of the case or underneath. You might need to undo a screw.

Should also be listed in the Device Manager.
 
All Dell laptops are really easy to remove the hard drive on.

Probably just 3 screws on the back.

Take a photo of the bottom of the laptop

edit


remove battery & power lead first
 
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I have an inspiron 1520 and when replacing the drive with an SSD it's frankly my favoured PC in the house now, faster at booting/in use than my RAID setup on my desktop PC. Worth considering as previously I barely touched the laptop due to the awful HDD performance :)
 
Only had time to have a quick look last night, the HDD is a Western Digital.
Event viewer is showing multiple entries for Atapi Event ID 11, "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0"
Am I definietely looking at a hardware error?. Laptop is only a few months old, so well within warranty. I guess I'll have to download and run some sort of diagnostics tool for the HDD.
 
That is a very typical hard drive is broken, error

Either return it to Dell (not sure what their turn around is, might be very good) or fit a new drive yourself
 
bledd. said:
You get round to fixing this?
Click to expand...

Been a bit tied up lately with one thing and another. Did a complete Windows reinstall to rule out anything software related and ... surprise, surprise... I still have a problem.
The laptop has its own diagnostics programs that can be run from a hidden system partition. Ran the HDD tests last night , came up with the same error several times during the Confidence Test- "Msg DISK - Interrupt Request (IRQ) did not set in time". Had to abort it in the end as at the rate it was going it would have taken days to finish the test. Google hasn't really turned up anything useful so my next course of action is to contact Dell technical support as the machine is still under warranty.
All the help so far is appreciated, cheers.
 
That event viewer error is 100% a hard drive problem.

Well I guess it could be the controller, but they very rarely break..

Moving parts = always break :D
 
Just an update on this problem, just got off the phone to Dell terchnical support who are sending me out a new hard drive for Thursday, so hopefully problem resolved.
 
Wow, that's awesome, I figured they'd make you send the whole thing in, wait a few weeks, get it back
 
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