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HP laptop running Vista just became incredibly slow

F

FredFredrickson

Senior member
  1. Overview of the problem
    Simply put, my laptop has recently become so slow that I can hardly use it. Almost anything makes the computer pause for anywhere between 30-90 seconds, and occasionally programs crash after the wait.

  2. Full description of the problem and symptoms
    This may or may not be related, but about 4 days ago, the touch buttons on the upper end of my laptop (above the keyboard), which depend on HP's software, stopped functioning. This type of thing has happened before, so I ignored it. About 2 days after that, the laptop began having performance problems, where in the course of about 1-2 hours of use, there would be a few times where the system would stop responding for a second. Now, I turn it on and it seems to boot up at a normal speed, but as soon as Vista appears, things start slowing down. When I move the mouse around the screen, all the buttons (Start button, desktop icons, etc.) highlight normally, but when I click on My Computer to open it up, there is a 30-90 second delay before the window appears. After that, the window intermittently becomes unresponsive for periods of 15-20 seconds now and then. This unresponsiveness seems to be accompanied by the hard drive light coming on.

  3. Did it work normally at one time, or has the problem always existed?
    This computer hasn't had any problems until a few days ago (as described above). I haven't installed any new software on it during this time, and haven't done any questionable browsing (and I use Firefox).

  4. Is the problem consistent and repeatable, or entirely random, or semi-random?
    The problem is consistent and repeatable in that all I have to do is turn on the computer and it happens.

  5. I already tried these steps:
    - I let Scandisk run on boot yesterday, and it reported no problems.
    - I installed Avast! last night and let it do a scan on boot overnight. So far as I can tell, it found no problems, but the computer also failed to boot after it ran, giving me an error that basically said it couldn't initialize the login dialog. The computer booted normally after a reset.
    - I've visually scanned msconfig for any odd programs that might be bogging the system down, but cannot find anything that looks suspicious.
    - I've used Task Manager to monitor the CPU usage of all the running programs on the computer, but during idle, none seem to be the cause of the problem.
    - Indexing is turned off for the hard disk, so I know that's not the problem.

  6. My software:
    • OS: Windows Vista Home PRemium SP2
    • AV: Avast!

  7. My hardware
    • HP Pavilion dv7t
    • CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 (2.1 Ghz)
    • GPU: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 (1 Gb)
    • RAM: 3GB DDR2

  8. Other information that might be relevant
    I'm well-versed with computers, and usually don't have problems like this - but with this, I just don't know where to begin trying to diagnose the problem. If anyone out there might have an idea as to why this is happening, any help would be highly appreciated. Thanks!

 
Apologies for the double post, but I just wanted to thank all the people who viewed this topic, and report it as solved.

After fiddling around with the laptop some more last night, I finally got an error that pointed me in the right direction. Occasionally, when the system would get to the point where it was not usable, if I pressed ALT+CTRL+DEL, the system would hang for a minute or two, then the screen would go black and it would hang for another minute, and then an error would come up with the following text:

Login process has failed to create the security options dialog
Click to expand...
I searched for this on Google and found the following link: http://www.vistaheads.com/foru...ty-options-dialog.html

The users there discuss the situation from a few different angles, but one thing I had not tried was to restart into the repair utility and check the disk from there. Even though the ScanDisk on boot did not find anything, I felt that a more thorough check was warranted because of the randomness of the errors I was receiving.

After running chkdsk /r, I seem to have found the problem - the utility found a few bad sectors on the hard drive, and repaired a lot of problems. It was very sluggish through certain parts of the tests, so I think the ultimate problem is just a faulty drive. I'll have to look into a replacement if the laptop isn't still under the warranty.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who might have helped, and hopefully this information will aid someone else in the future. 🙂
 
Originally posted by: FredFredrickson
After running chkdsk /r, I seem to have found the problem - the utility found a few bad sectors on the hard drive, and repaired a lot of problems. It was very sluggish through certain parts of the tests, so I think the ultimate problem is just a faulty drive. I'll have to look into a replacement if the laptop isn't still under the warranty.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who might have helped, and hopefully this information will aid someone else in the future. 🙂
Click to expand...

Had a similar problem with my work laptop. Drive didn't show any bad sectors but began having SMART errors and such. Replaced drive and has been fine since.
 
One other thing to consider: is your ISP broadband or dialup? Could be a busy time for computer users, e.g. Saturday night. That happened to me recently and when I went back to the computer after the weekend, the problem wasn't evident. Another option is too many programs installed, using up your RAM. If neither of those is relevant, you must have found the problem yourself.
 
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