Serious problem with 5024 - possibly hdd related

Hey there guys, my first post on the forums so be easy eh

Anyway onto the problem at hand, i recently purchased an Acer Aspire 5024WLMi, it has been great until about two days ago where i noticed after a day of listening to music through the laptop whilst doing various other things the laptop seemed to really slow down, so i restarted the laptop and it was still being slow so i shut it down and left for a few hours thinking the laptop was just overheated (it was a hot day). Anyhow, that night when i got back i booted the laptop up again and it took about 5mins to get onto the windows log-in screen! And now things are always pretty juddery with the mouse pointer skipping around everywhere.

Now im pretty positive this fault is down to the harddrive because i've ran all the virus scanners and spyware programs aswell (which take a long time to run!) And also running benchmark programs like SiSoft Sandra the hdd test will not complete, and earlier i tried running HDTach which took about an hour just to get 30% through!

So, has anyone else experienced this problem before? It really is starting to get annoying now as i cant really do much in the way of gaming, and browsing around is even annoying with the 'lag' someone help!

 

Most probably your guess is correct, the HDD might be on the verge of giving up, back up any data and send the laptop to Acer for replacement of the hard drive. The same sort of lag happenend to my old Toshiba and the hard drive was the cause. I suspect this might be the case for your laptop as well.

 

Yes i thought it was the hard drive going, oh well i'll try reformat it asap to see if that helps (couldnt see why) then i will get in contact with Acer, this is all pretty frustrating :mad. On a side note, how long does this process usually take?

 

Oh also one thing to add on is a weird pattern in cpu usage, it always fluctuates quite a fair bit, and it's currently on 100% usage even though i only have firefox,winamp,steam,messenger and a few other programs running

 

Also try running some of the diagnostic software provided by the manufacturer of the hard drive(generally a free download on their websites) . If there are some problems it should be able to catch or confirm the state of the hard drive.

 

What is the app/process that is using 100% of the CPU time? On Acer's there was a reported problem with the Acer Manager (I think that's what it was called). People reported that it would always be at 100% at bootup and the system was slow. Just by disabling it, it eliminated the lag. This can be disabled by running MSCONFIG and uncheck the box for the Acer Manager.

-Vb-

 

Well i've done all the hard drive diagnostics and they all say the hard drive is fine, i also ran HDTACH and my average read speed was 1.1mb/s . Oh and i cant find the acer manager anywhere in msconfig file. Oh and one more thing is the task manager is reporting that the 'System Idle Process' is taking up all the cpu power, but i cant stop it.

 

Yeah before you format, like everyone else said, check to see what process is taking up your CPU, try disabling it, and then see what happens.

If all else fails, reformat and reinstall windows.

Then, if you are still having probs, call acer. BTW, how is acer support?

 

I have the same problem - after running for day or two, when hdd gets quite hot it turns off the DMA. That's what causes the CPU usage, and slow transfers.

At first I thought my hdd was going to crash, but now when it happened for the second time I found what's realy wrong.
Unfortunately I don't know how to enable DMA as there is no such option in bios.

I'll try to solve this later today if I find something I'll post the solution here.

 

it is normal that the "System Idle Process" is taking all the CPU power.

Did you try to defragment your partitions?

Can you list all of the services which are running on your machine?

Zibu:
Right click on my computer - hardware - device manager - IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers - Right click on Primary IDE Channel - Properties - Advanced Settings - Transfer mode



Regards, VidKo

 

Well it is set to: "DMA if available", but Current Transfer mode is: PIO mode 4

 

Set it to PIO mode and reboot. Then set it back to DMA and reboot. Perhaps it will help. We will find a solution.

Regards, VidKo

 

And how to reenable it, read the solution here. Hope it helps.

Regards, VidKo

 

Thanks a lot VidKo, I'll try that as soon as I get home and post the results here.
If it doesn't work, there's always a way by reinstalling Windows, but I'd rather avoid that.

Regards, Zibu

Update:

After uninstalling and reinstaling Primary IDE Channel everything seems to be working fine.
I just wonder if this was hdd problem, or rather some other part.