Roff

My wife has this really old Toshiba Satellite laptop. She only uses it for email and Freecell, and an occasional Gogle search, so until recently, it was fine.
The battery has been dead for years, so we leave it plugged in and turned on. A couple of weeks ago, we turned it off while we were cleaning house, and ever since, it works right after a reboot, but very shortly after that it gets so slow that it is unusable. I ran a virus scan on the hard drive with Avast (the free version that always runs in the background). It came back negative. I did a defrag, and that didn't help. I would like to get it running again, but I'm out of ideas. Do you guys have any?

__________________
Ron

Hank Fletcher

And the task manager doesn't say anything's running?

Sorry, I'm sure you probably checked that already. But that's about the limit of my PC debugging knowledge!

killivolt

I know that mine had some trouble recently. I had no virus activity. I cleaned out under the fan on the cpu it was shutting down ? I did a system restore point afterward and removed a few programs my daughter had installed for a pocket pc. I did all the updates and it came back.

What operating system you have ?

In addition were there any other Virus Scanning Software on the Computer ?

__________________
Truthiness Monkeys : Obedience, Ignorance, Fear.

Pommie

It sounds like it could be heat related. What happens if you let it hibernate? Does it come out of hibernation at full speed and then slow? What is you reboot without switching off? Have you tried running it without the battery?

Mike.

things

Is it possible to get all the information you need off it? I'd say just reformat it, that will wipe EVERYTHING. Just make sure you save all the important stuff first

__________________
The 3 laws of science....
1. If it smells bad, It's chemistry.
2. If it's mushy, It's biology.
3. If it doesn't work, It's physics.
www.laserpointerforums.com A forum for disscusion of lasers and laser shows!
www.laserchat.org IRC chat for laser and electronic related stuff.

eng1

I agree. I know that there are a lot of ways to fix computer problems, but if you have already used antivirus and spyware programs, defragged, etc. it might be the last resort. Getting back to a fresh registry certainly improves your PC's performance.

ericgibbs

Hi Roff,
I use these 3 freeware programs.

Hijackthis: this lists all the autorun programs with options to delete,etc
http://www.filehippo.com/download_hijackthis

Comodo Firewall: excellent firewall, lotsa details.
http://www.personalfirewall.comodo.com/

Advanced WindowsCare : this checks a number of functions, use with caution.
http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindows...l?Str=download

__________________
Eric
"Good enough is Perfect"

PIC tutorials:
Gramo's: www.digital-diy.net/
Bill's: www.blueroomelectronics.com/

picasm

Another thing to do is check the hard drive for errors - perhaps it has some bad sectors that can slow down the pc if it has to make several attempts to read data on some areas of the disk.

Usually you would hear the hard drive clicking much more than normal if it is having these problems.

Try doing a Scandisk (Checkdisk in XP) and tick the option to "scan for and attempt the recovery of bad sectors"

Torben

Check the CMOS battery and your BIOS settings. Could be a problem there with a machine that old.


Torben

killivolt

I'm thinking a fan. If you shut it off then now's the problem check for a bad fan on the CPU they can't get going from a dead stop ?

__________________
Truthiness Monkeys : Obedience, Ignorance, Fear.

Roff

OK, a lot of good ideas. Thanks, guys. I'll report back when I find the solution (or throw it away).

__________________
Ron

Bob Scott

Hi Ron.

I bet you find clogged air cooling or a heat sink that has come loose.

Some of the other guesses don't make sense considering the thing works fine until it warms up.

Bob

UTMonkey

How old is old? Pentium chips which get too hot throttle down to crawling speed to save the chip.

If you think about it there arent that many moving parts on a laptop, hard disk or fan. Unless the laptop has been dropped you can rule out the HDD, if you are looking for a physical fault go for the fan!

killivolt

If you do get it going again be sure you do all MS updates.

Remove all installed Virus Scanning Programs/possible conflics.

1. First begin with add/remove in control panel.

2. Then search for any folders under name of program/remove any.

3. Exporting registry/Editing registry.

A. Create a folder on the Desktop (name it backup)

B. Go to run/ type-regedit. This will open the registry editor.

C. Go to File/choose export. In the open box type (backup)
and save look in the folder on the desktop to insure that the registry is there. On second thought do not open it if it is there !!! Only if you entend on re-installing it.

D. Go back to registry editor/ choose (edit) and use (find) type in the Name of the Virus Program eg norton,mcafee ? make sure you hit the +or- symbol on (my computer) this will make the tree come to the top to insure the search is complete.

E. Begin by Deleting the first hit. Then repeat this sequence f3 which will find next item delete and repeat.

F. When finished reboot if it boots ok and all seems good turn off sys restore/ trash the folder marked backup empty trash and reboot again turn system restore back on.


4. Re-install virus program of your choice.

(Pete and re-Pete are in a boat pete fell out who's was left ?)

__________________
Truthiness Monkeys : Obedience, Ignorance, Fear.

Torben

He's running Avast antivirus. At any rate, that's an insane way to remove software unless you have a very good reason. Use Control Panel => Add/Remove Programs to uninstall software without the risk of b0rking your machine badly. In this case no removal is likely to be necessary--as Bob and Mike noted, it's probably just overheating. (Weird ideas like mine with the CMOS battery failing are for after overheating has been ruled out.) It could also be a trojan which needed the reboot to activate, but I'd say check the heat issues first.

Other questions for Ron (Roff):

Does the hard drive thrash or become heavily active when the slowdown occurs?

Are things like mouse cursor tracking and keyboard response slowed down or otherwise affected, or is it just program load times and run speeds (including things like the Windows shell) which slow way down?

Do you have the ability to check using another OS? i.e. can you boot an old DOS or Linux from floppy or CD (or another partition) and see if you still have the slowdown issue? If you do it's definitely hardware and not a trojan or such. Another way to check this is to boot to safe mode command line and try to run some DOS software from floppy (Defender is a half-decent DOS game which I think you can still download) and see if the slowdown still happens. The game is just to try to get the processor active.

What peripherals (if any) are plugged in?


Torben