Netbook has become extremely slow...

[Jeff7181]

My mom has an HP Mini 1000 netbook. It has Windows XP on it, 1 GB of RAM, an Atom processor and a 16 GB Sandisk SSD. There's over 4 GB of free space on the drive.

Within the past couple months it has slowed to a crawl. Rebooting helps temporarily but eventually it seems disk activity goes up and up and up and eventually the SSD is being accessed constantly and the CPU is just sitting there idle. It takes roughly 10 minutes to open Internet Explorer. I'm trying to uninstall an application right now (a HP user manual application) and it's been uninstalling for 20 minutes and estimates 30 minutes remaining.

I'm guessing this is all because of the SSD and the slowness AnAnd discovered with SSD drives as they're used. Is there any way to remedy this?

Also... I wonder if it would help if I stuck a SD card in there and moved the swap file to it, and maybe some data?

 

[corkyg]

Does your SSD do TRIM, and does, the HP netbook support it?

 

[mfenn]

I'm willing to bet that the "SSD" in the netbook is only an SSD in the sense that it is solid state. It most likely is more akin to a glorified SD card or USB memory stick than what we enthusiasts think of as an SSD. I wouldn't be surprised if the free block list is empty and the disk is having to do a read-modify-write every single time. Coupled with the fact that the flash that is in there is surely slow as dirt, I could imagine the drive being very slow.

OP, pray that the netbook uses a standard 2.5" drive, yank that piece of trash out, and put in a normal HDD or a real SSD (OCZ, Intel, etc.).

 

[Jeff7181]

Does your SSD do TRIM, and does, the HP netbook support it?

No.

 

[Jeff7181]

I'm willing to bet that the "SSD" in the netbook is only an SSD in the sense that it is solid state. It most likely is more akin to a glorified SD card or USB memory stick than what we enthusiasts think of as an SSD. I wouldn't be surprised if the free block list is empty and the disk is having to do a read-modify-write every single time. Coupled with the fact that the flash that is in there is surely slow as dirt, I could imagine the drive being very slow.

OP, pray that the netbook uses a standard 2.5" drive, yank that piece of trash out, and put in a normal HDD or a real SSD (OCZ, Intel, etc.).

I don't think it's a 2.5, but it's not easily accessible so I'm not sure. I'll see if I can look up the serial number of the drive that's in there and find out what size it is.

 

[Jeff7181]

Yeah... it's a 1.8... and not even a real 1.8. Just a glorified flash drive.

I'm going to stick a SD card in it and put the swap file on that and the IE temp directory and see what that does.

 

[Winterpool]

Yeah... it's a 1.8... and not even a real 1.8. Just a glorified flash drive.

I'm going to stick a SD card in it and put the swap file on that and the IE temp directory and see what that does.

Ah, I'm curious to see whether using an SD card 'swap disk' can make a difference here.

 

[Jeff7181]

Unfortunately no... stupid Windows XP puts a page file on the system partition even if I specify otherwise.

I can't replace the SSD either, because to put a full size 1.8 inch drive in it you have to remove the only USB port that exists, and my mom uses it with her iPod so she needs that port.

 

[mfenn]

Unfortunately no... stupid Windows XP puts a page file on the system partition even if I specify otherwise.

I can't replace the SSD either, because to put a full size 1.8 inch drive in it you have to remove the only USB port that exists, and my mom uses it with her iPod so she needs that port.

Well that sucks, at least it's only a netbook. You may want to think about replacing it with a newer one that has a normal 160GB HDD.

 

[Bateluer]

Unfortunately no... stupid Windows XP puts a page file on the system partition even if I specify otherwise.

I can't replace the SSD either, because to put a full size 1.8 inch drive in it you have to remove the only USB port that exists, and my mom uses it with her iPod so she needs that port.

Good thing netbooks are relatively cheap then.

 

[Jeff7181]

Actually, it does have two USB ports so I guess I could look into replacing the SSD.

 

[dawza]

Does FlashFire support your platform? I had a similar issue with my Mini9 and its POS SSD, and FlashFire helped immensely.

Be warned, though- the last time I checked, it was still a beta product, and many people, myself included, have had odd issues with it (i.e. since installing FlashFire, on bootup, Windows wants to run chkdsk every time). I would definitely back up any important data first.