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Incredibly slow computer but without obvious cause

Incredibly slow computer but without obvious cause

A friend has asked me to help him out with a laptop that has begun to run incredibly slow. The machine previously worked efficiency but recently has become unbearable slow. The machine is a Toshiba Satellite M45 running Windows XP SP3.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 185
Total answers/comments: 5
Guest [Entry]

"Check to see if the hard drive has reverted back to PIO mode instead of using DMA. In the device manager expand the ""IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers"" section, and check the Primary and Secondary IDE channels ""Properties"" dialog. On the ""Advanced Settings"" tab there is usually an indicator as to what mode the controller (and channel) are operating in, as well as a way to change it.

Be aware though, Windows will often fall back to PIO mode if it experiences something like 3 DMA errors in less than and hour or something like that. It could be an early warning sign of something else failing.

One other thing you could try that might give you another data point, if you have enough RAM in there you could try booting Knoppix with the ""toram"" option. If it runs like a champ, I think you can safely identify the storage system as the bottleneck."
Guest [Entry]

blow out all the dust in the vents on the laptop and then put a home fan so that it blows directly onto or at least as close to the cpu as possible. It could be a heat issue. check that first to make sure it is not before messing with the harddrive.
Guest [Entry]

"Look for spyware / adware.
I have run Spybot Search & Desroy on several friends computers exactly because they were running unbearably slow. Each time I found dozens of spyware and adware / crapware programs installed. Spybot has always done a great job of removing these and the normal speed has come back. I in one case I also found a virus. I googled for a method to remove the virus and had her renew her Norton AV subscriptions which were about 18 months out of date."
Guest [Entry]

Further to what Goyuix says, I had a Dell laptop which had reverted to PIO mode. I first clued in on this when I realized that the HD access light was flashing almost continuously, even when the computer wasn't doing anything. Apparently this can be caused when the HD and the CD are sharing the same cable, and you try to use a bad CD which causes read errors.
Guest [Entry]

"Check Process Manager to see if something is eating up all your CPU cycles.
Even Windows Update has been known to do that."