Incredibly slow computer performance

[CTho9305]

One of my roommates' laptops (1GHz P3, 512MB ram) is performing really poorly - it feels incredibly sluggish, takes a long time to boot, etc. Initially we suspected the hard drive, but various things that don't access the hard drive are also slow.

I ran prime 95 in benchmark mode, and it performed somewhere between a Pentium Pro 200 and a Celeron 266. Memtest86 reports 67MB/sec bandwidth to memory, which sounds absurdly low to me.

Turning off hardware acceleration didn't really have any effect, and safe mode was also slow (so that pretty much clears the video card driver).

Knoppix felt slow, but it was hard to get a quantitative performance number, because everything loads from CD, so it's slow anyway.

At the beginning of the summer it was sent to Dell under warranty, but they claimed there was spill damage (there wasn't) and refused to service it. Some time over the summer, it did receive spill damage, so he can't send it back again.

Any ideas?

 

[CTho9305]

^

 

[TGHI]

Spyware? Memory leaks? Kick open Msconfig and see what's runinng in the startup group.

 

[CTho9305]

No, I killed various processes. It's strange, because task manager uses ~30-40% of the CPU just sitting there.

 

[AluminumStudios]

It sounds to me like it would most likely be an OS/software issue. Have you tried wiping and rebuilding it? Spyware, etc., can really hide iteself and degrade performance.

 

[mbackof]

Have you defragged the hard drive? I would check for spyware as well.

 

[farscape]

As I clicked on this thread I thought, "wonder if it's a Dell?".

Then I read it.

Yeah.

 

[grabadude]

Checked for spyware/viruses and defragged?

 

[Feep]

i encoutered a similar issue on a dell laptop that i was being paid to fix. Reistalled windows and everything worked fine. Easiest $50 i ever made.

 

[sharkeeper]

Sounds like a power management issue to me.

That 1.0 GHz CPU may be speedstepped down to 200MHz.

Cheers!