System is running extremely slow....Unresolved but no longer an issue.

[El Tigre]

Got a call from the mother in law saying her Lenovo laptop is running extremely slow. I fired this thing up and it took what seemed like an eternity to finally boot into windows. Everything I tried to open seemed slow as molasses. I also saw a couple of errors about disk usage being extremely high, but there are almost 140 gigs of free space on the drive.

Laptop is about 3-4 years old and is running Windows XP This particular laptop has already had to have a hard drive replaced about 6 months ago. She took it to a local shop and they sold her a new hard drive.

It has a WD hard drive so I tried running their diagnostic on it. I took almost four hours to check this 160 gig hard drive. But the drive passed the diagnostic.

Now I am wondering if it could possibly be having issues with the memory. Would that cause this type of slow down? I will try removing the memory if possible and testing the sticks. Not sure what she has in it. I know it has 1 gig of ram but am not sure if there is one or two pieces.

Any other ideas?

 

[corkyg]

What model of Lenovo laptop? Has the HDD ever been defragged and optimized? Has it been scanned for malware? Is it running on battery or A/C?

 

[El Tigre]

I don't know off hand what model it is.
As far as being defragged & optimized I would say probably not. HDD is only 6 months old and the mother in law has no computer savvy at all.

The system does have Norton AV on it and it said the last scan was yesterday morning. No detections.

I didn't have a lot of time with it last night. Didn't know how long the diagnostics took until moms called me this morning at work.

I will try running some Malwarebytes and spybot on it this evening.

This thing is not just slow it is virtually unusable at this point.

Running on AC power.

 

[neocpp]

Can you test the drive in another machine? Or put another drive into that machine?

 

[El Tigre]

I will try swapping the drive out this evening when i get a chance.

Just talked to her a few minutes ago and it sounds like moms is leaning towards buying a new laptop, so I may have plenty of time to tinker with this one in the future.LOL She is not very patient with anything that does not function as it should.

 

[VirtualLarry]

If the laptop is slow, and old, perhaps it is throttling/overheating, possibly because the thermal solution is clogged with lint or dust.

 

[ilisidi]

Weird thing - check to see what all is in startup? My sister gave me her laptop for a similar problem and not only did I find over 800 instances of spyware/malware, but she had like. 50 things in startup, and 8 internet explorer toolbars.

also you could try increasing the size of the page file.

 

[El Tigre]

OK
I ran malwarebytes and spybot = no malware

Norton av = no infections

Hdd passed all of WD's diagnostics

Pulled the ram and replaced with ram from daughters laptop = seemed to make it a little better. could have been the fact that i went from 1 to 2 gigs.

Put the 1gig stick in my daughters Windows 7 laptop = it has been running fine with no errors

Used msconfig to stop a bunch of crap from starting up = huge difference in speed.

Still getting strange errors though = this USB device can run faster if you use the USB 2 port when no USB device was even attached...WTF ? High memory and Cpu usage errors also.

Moms used the laptop for several hours this morning with no issues...go figure

I'm thinking it needs to be reformatted and windows reinstalled.

Moms has ordered a new laptop from Newegg so it looks like I will have plenty of time to get to the bottom of this in a few days.

Thanks for all the helpful advice.

 

[crown711]

ccleaner,best software EVER