Win 7, Poor Performance

Father Ted

Father Ted

Father Ted

Associate
Joined
7 Dec 2006
Posts
1,632
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?
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom