very slow laptop

[KenA]

Im trying to sort out a laptop for a friend and its really slow.

Ive done the usual maintenance like disk clean up, ATF Cleaner, Reg mechanic, Disk Defrag, Malwarebytes scan but its still very slow. CPU is running at 70%+ with no programs running by the user.

Ive disabled the auto-start feature on some programs to speed up boot times but that doesnt seem to make a difference either.

Oh..its a Dell Inspiron 1300 with 1Gb ram, 60Gb HD and Win XP sp3.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[liljim]

Ok now look, DONT INSTALL NORTON 09 ON IT!!

lol....seriously though. CPU is at 70% usage? If so, whats the file name(s) thats using resources?

[KenA]

[liljim]

Yea, id say thats taking a bit too long. My first thought KenA is to run the defrag in safe mode. Heres a tip that for some reason doesnt get spread around as much as it should. You cant move a file thats in use and defragging is all about moving file fragments back to the order they belong in. Doing this in safe mode means way less files are in use allowing more to get done without interference. I dont know how Diskeeper pro works in comparison to the old default windows defragger but windows is bad about restarting the defrag process if a file gets read or written to during the process which is another good reason to do it in safe mode.

Also, pull up the default windows defragger anyways and hit analyze. After its done hit view report and see what percentage of file fragmentation is listed. The higher the number the longer it will take.

[Gecko]

KenA,

Is this the same laptop with the 40gig of mp3s?
If so then I would suspect that there is not enough free space on the HDD.
Recommend amount of free space is 15% that's just for windows, that's about 9gigs I bet it's a lot less than that.

Cleaning out the temp files might help but you really should have 20% free space to accommodate windows temp files and any scratch disk space needed.

[KenA]

Gecko, this IS he same laptop. On close inspection there was actually only 12gb of music on it.

The defrag is finished and it was seriously heavly fragmented. Its in good health now.
I removed all music and photos etc from this laptop to my external HD and this is whats showing up:

C:\
total Size 38.7Gb
free space 27.2gb

D:(back up) total Space 13.9gb
Free space 13.5gb

The drive is partitioned.

When booted up it runs fairly ok but doesnt take much for the cpu to be at 100%.
it takes just over 5 mins to boot to a state where i can use it. Theres not much in the system tray at start-up so im a bit confused here.

[liljim]

[KenA]

Well if i run any program (eg scanner etc) it takes forever and i cant do anything else till its finished.

[Gecko]

KenA,

Sounds to me like something is eating up your CPU usage, maybe it's time for Hijackthis and combofix scans.

[KenA]

Ya maybe ur right ...ill do a hijack this scan and post in the Hijack this section.

[PcTestCard.com]

If the system has 1GB Ram, the virtual ram should set to 1.5GB.

Run from DOS "chkdsk C: " to scan HDD for error, if there is a known good HDD, try to swap and see if laptop runs faster.
Sometimes, bad sector on the HDD may cause the problem.

Hope this helps!
Bill

[Axelation]

Like liljim mentioned before, I would be curious to see what application is starting that is maxing the cpu. If you run msconfig, you may can uncheck some things and see if one of the startups are causing it. Sometimes a virus scanner even after it has been uninstalled, will try to run updates or something. McAfee and Norton are bad about leaving the Live Updates software on after un-installation. Also have seen printer/scanner/camera software do that as well. You should go through and uncheck anything you don't need to start up. Adobe, iTunes, msnmessenger, yahoo, whatever. Don't forget to also click the services tab, hide all microsoft services, and uncheck those associated with what you unchecked in start up as well.

[KenA]

I ran the chckdsk and it it says
"windows found problems with the file system. Run chkdsk with the /F option to correct these"

i tried chkdsk /f but it says
"the type of file system is NTFS. Cannot lock current drive"
"chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts?"

[Gecko]

Did you click yes, reboot and let it run?

[KenA]

I did but nothing apparent happened.

I did the chkdsk again and i got the same message.

Current status:

Laptop takes about 7 mins to boot to a state where i can access the internet or any other application.

When it does eventually boot, applications open fairly quickly. When i have task manager open i see that virtually anything you do or any application i open takes about 70-100%cpu. I darent try to open 2 programs at once or it freezes.

I DID msconfig and unchecked some applications eg camera, itunes etc but no difference.

i did chkdsk and it told me it had errors but wouldnt fix it.

I ran combofix and hijack this and my log appears to be clean.