W3J Extreme Slowness .. HDD Problem ?

Hey guys,

Something is not right here .. All of a sudden my notebook is just sloooow. Takes me about 4 minutes to boot Windows and even longer to load a hibernation image file. All operations in Windows are also noticebly slower .. Even moving or deleting icons on the desktop ..

I have hunch it's the HDD .. has anyone else experienced such slowdowns ? Any ideas ?

Btw, I'm running stock everything, no RAM or HD upgrades what-so-ever.

Cheers.

 

Sounds like the HD.

Have you tried to defrag it?

 

Haven't defragged yet .. I'll give that a shot.

Thanks.

 

open task manager and look for a file taking a lot of cpu ticks.

Ya it might go slow like that for a while if its hd failure.

normally it will hourglass and bsod reset.

can also be file system error so windows error checker might be good.

 

Check if the IDE interface has dropped into PIO mode. This would cause extreme slowness and very high CPU utilisation.

John

 

There's nothing unusual in the task manager, no RAM/CPU hungry processes. I'm not getting any BSODs either, however I did notice a few runtime errors when launching various applications.

The Primary IDE also checks out .. it's presently set on DMA.

I'm running a defrag right now .. hopefully that'll fix my problem.

Thank for your help guys. I'll keep you updated.

 

Better backup important things just in case the HD is going to die

 

Run scandisk and have it do a surface scan. Get hold of S.M.A.R.T HDD software like HDDlife and see if it reports an impeding HDD failure..

 

Defrag fixed everything Thanks for your help guys !!

Cheers.

 

Ok, I thought the defrag fixed my problem, but I'm still seeing some serious performance issues .. Booting in and out of windows as well as hibernation is painfully slow.

I ran a full chkdisk and defrag. HDDLife indicates that my HD is 100% healthy. Any more ideas ? I'm thinking perhaps I should just format. Would that help any ?

Thanks for your help !

 

The Event Viewer may show errors if there are software issues. Check the application and system hives.

Does the available RAM memory show correctly? Check how much is available, being used and the total.

Is the slowdown related to CPU intensive applications? or does this just happen during boot and hibernate? What about non windows native apps like Photoshop or gaming? (Moving and copying files is explorer)

Antivirus scanning in the background maybe?

 

Ok, now I'm really stumped .. HDDlife states that my Fujitsu HDD is in "Perfect Condition". Yet just yesterday, I got two BSODs within a few hours .. So if the HDD is not at fault, what's wrong with my system ??

Another weird thing .. When I try editing the msconfig startup list, it gives me an error .. it says I'm not Administrator, therefore I don't have permission to change msconfig.

Could this just be Windows acting up ? Perhaps a format is in order ? What do you guys think ?

Cheers.

 

I've experienced the msconfig issue when my box was infected with a trojan horse.

In your case though, it is possible that you are logged in as a normal user or limited account.

I guess you could do a system restore..?

 

Oh well I saw this late....but in future..Do NOT use XP DeFrag feature. It destroys data from what I have heard. Instead use something like Spinrite and so on.

 

The XP Defrag program was licensed by MS from a major system utilities manufacturer. It doesn't destroy data, but it's not very effective at what it is supposed to do - it requires a lot of free space to run and doesn't do a very good job of consolidating the free space remaining on the job.

There are two major after market defrag programs: Diskeeper and PerfectDisk.

I've had very good luck with PerfectDisk. Does a great job, relatively quickly.

Diskeeper seems to have all the same problems as the XP Defrag program - leaves a lot of fragmented free space (which becomes fragmented files really quickly), and takes a long time. This probably has to do with the fact that MS licensed an old version of Diskeeper to put into XP

 

Ditto and the AV program couldn't get rid of it either. A backup of all important data + a reformat seems your best option at the moment.

Sorry!
~ Brett

 

It's based on an old version of Diskeeper. I'm sure newer versions are much more efficient and do the job much better.

~ Brett

 

I tried both... In my experience PerfectDisk was much better. It's more aggressive at putting all the free space in one block at the end of the drive, which reduces the rate of fragmentation afterwards.

 

Alright, thanks for the advice guys .. I will definitely try to get my hands on PerfectDisk.

Btw, I did find a Trojan the other day with AVG, and I *think* it was removed .. I'll have to run another scan and see.

Cheers.