Really slooooooooow system

pinkoboe

pinkoboe

pinkoboe

Associate
Joined
19 Feb 2003
Posts
105
A pack of Jaffa Cakes to anyone who can assist me with this bloody problem, in fact make that a shipment's worth.

A few months ago I bought a Inspirion 9400 laptop, everything ran fine for a couple of months until for some reason everything started to get very slow. I didn't really investigate the cause of the problem and decided to just format it instead, got everything loaded up again and it ran nice and quick again. A month or so later and it's now doing the same thing, after a bit of digging around, the hard drive is accessing at ~1.5mb/s (got this information from HD Tune) which clearly is absolute crap. I've tried a chkdsk, the Seagate hdd tools, accessed the SMART logs and everything seemingly reports back fine. It certainly sounds like a HDD problem however I can't get my head round why a format would (temporarily) fix it. Also ran a Kaspersky virus scan and that's fine too. Windows takes about five minutes to load and occasionally it doesn't even get to the desktop but instead a blank screen.

Ideally I'd like to benchmark it outside of Windows however I'm struggling to find a way to do so, my understanding is Linux can't easily access an NTFS drive and so far all the DOS based boot disks I've tried have been crap.

The drive is currently running in UDMA5 and it's a 80gb Seagate SATA job. Windows is Media Center Edition.

I'm at a complete loss as to what to try next, every test I've tried reports the hdd as being fine, Dell will only take the laptop back if I do a system restore, which based on last time's experience, will fix the problem for a while so that won't help.

/sigh

Any ideas would be massively appreciated...
 
Long shot but have you got the latest drivers for your laptop and the latest Windows Updates?

And is this XP MCE? Do you remember doing anything to your PC at the time it started to get slow? Install something? Change a setting? New drivers?

Have you defragged recently? Is your Page File set by Windows? Is that fragmented?

Sorry to bombard you with questions, I just mean to try and see if anything pops out at you or to get you to find out the answers and see if you can discover anything along the way that might help us get to the bottom of this.

And was the laptop new from Dell? Or a refurbished model?
 
Chrikey, that was a quick reply :)

Ok, it's XP MCE, the laptop was originally supplied with XP Home but I needed MCE for integration with my 360. No new programs / hardware have been installed to coincide with it going slow, likewise for settings and drivers were all the very latest when I formatted the machine. I did try the Intel inf update thing tonight but that hasn't made any difference.

Defrag wise, the system runs so slow it takes an absolute age to do, however the program literally wasn't there one minute and there the next, so it hasn't been a gradual problem. Page file settings are all on default and there's plenty of space on the hdd.

The machine is new from Dell and under warranty, from what I've been told, they will only look at the machine if it's got the original install on there which in this case it hasn't. If I could definitely prove the hdd is at fault, I could try my luck with Seagate directly but as it stands, everything reports it's okay, all bar it running at 1.5mb/s...
 
Did the Seagate tools check the disk for errors? What kind of checks did it run?

What boot disks have you tried? Ultimate Boot CD? System Restore CD?

Have you deffo got latest updates from Windows Update? And what about the Device Manager tab? Any errors there?
 
So far I've tried Hiren's Boot CD, I had a quick peak at Ultimate Boot CD but I couldn't see a HDD benchmark program listed, it's probably worth giving it a go though, so I will get that downloaded today while I'm at work.

The Seagate tools has about five different checks it can do, I've tried every one and all report the drive is okay, not a single fault in fact. The device manager looks perfect too.

I'm just doing a Window's update (there's about ten or so updates), we'll see if that makes any difference.

Off to work now, but I will report back later, cheers everyone.
 
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