Dying Laptop..... Help Needed Please

Janice

Janice

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Janice
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Right guys... I am FAIRLY proficient with computers.. I install hardware etc.. and get friends' pc's going again when they have problems.

My son texted me today from the University of Kent to say his Toshiba Satellite laptop which is about 3 years old and not particularly fast has suddenly gone so slow it took 20 minutes to start up today!

I told him to quickly back up his stuff if poss in case I have to do a reinstall of everything...... and he said he would email his important essays to his university email address.

He then got back in touch and said the folder where the essay is took over 2 hrs to open!

He cant run AVG as it just is toooo slow to do even that.

He is going to come home specially on Thursday afternoon for me to look at it.

If I do a reinstall he could lose his essay as trying to write to a disc would probably take about 15 hours!

Any ideas what I could do to get it running normally again apart from a full reinstall. He is running Windows XP SP2.

I have suggested he tries a system restore to take it back to yesterday or the day before when it was ok..........but to be honest Im not sure it would even manage to work hard enough to actually go thru the process.
 
hmmm it could be a virus or it could be ram or cpu dying if it did die you can get people to get it of the hard drive but if you format it its gone i am not sure what is the best way
 
There is a possibility that it's malware causing the slowdown. Get yourself a copy of process explorer on there and look to see what if any processes are consuming all the CPU time.

Other than that it could also be that the HD is just on its way out. Or it's so low on HD space that the windows swap file can't now grow anymore. There are loads of possibilities to be honest.

If things are so dire that you can't even boot the machine, your first port of call is safe mode as you'll start up in a slimmed down state.
 
NathanJT said:
your first port of call is safe mode as you'll start up in a slimmed down state.
Click to expand...

i think I will get a safe mode and have a slimmed down state then!! ;)

So if I start in safe mode... and it starts up fine.. does it mean its one of the other drivers causing a problem. If he hasnt installed anything recently i dont reallyl know what to look for.
 
I reckon it's most likely to be a problem with the RAM, do you know how much and how many sticks are in the machine?
 
RAM wouln't have such a sudden dramatic effect though, whereas if windows couldn't build a swap file of suitable size, it would crawl. And if it was faulty in some way I'd of expected a few BSOD' by now!

Quite Ironic really as I've just had 64GB of RAM delivered for a server (so tempted to put some of it in my home PC hehehe).
 
Janice said:
i think I will get a safe mode and have a slimmed down state then!! ;)

So if I start in safe mode... and it starts up fine.. does it mean its one of the other drivers causing a problem. If he hasnt installed anything recently i dont reallyl know what to look for.
Click to expand...

Not necessarily. Safe mode will however give you a chance of getting the thing to a state where you can work with it. Give our Malware scanner a try as it's only 600KB and should complete within about 2 minutes: www.prevx.com/freescan.asp
 
NathanJT said:
RAM wouln't have such a sudden dramatic effect though, whereas if windows couldn't build a swap file of suitable size, it would crawl. And if it was faulty in some way I'd of expected a few BSOD' by now!

Quite Ironic really as I've just had 64GB of RAM delivered for a server (so tempted to put some of it in my home PC hehehe).
Click to expand...


It sounds like Swap file behaviour or it's been turned into a Spam-bot.

Run task manager & check to see how the resources are being used
 
Agreed, chances are task manager will have been disabled so grabbing a copy of Process Explorer is worth having!
 
I reckon the HDD is dying. Get whatever he can off it quick. If possible take the HDD out and put it in a caddy and hook it up to another PC, that might speed the process up a bit.

If it was virus/malware then surely it wouldn't take that long to boot, but would just be slow within Windows.
 
Well i will give everything a go guys when i get it back on thursday.

thanks for your help all.

Janice
 
markp said:
If it was virus/malware then surely it wouldn't take that long to boot, but would just be slow within Windows.
Click to expand...

Depends, if it were a rootkit it could be doing no end of things prior to windows starting.
 
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