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    Notebook starts up very slow, generally laggy performance lately

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by roland_j, Nov 17, 2008.

  1. roland_j

    roland_j Notebook Consultant

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    Im not sure where to post this.. but

    I have a 3 year old Vaio FS and after i got my xps i started using it for downloading. I left it on for a very long time, and now it is EXTREMELY slow. I checked HDTune and the transfer rates are insanely low.. something like 2mb/s. Start up literally takes 15 minutes, and loading programs takes forever. everything is sluggish. I was wondering if anyone can tell me how i can find out which component got messed up, so I could replace it.

    Thanks
     
    roland_j, Nov 17, 2008
    #1
  2. SpeedyMods

    SpeedyMods Notebook Deity

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    Sounds like the HDD to me.

    Greg
     
    SpeedyMods, Nov 17, 2008
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  3. ahl395

    ahl395 Ahlball

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    Id replace your Harddrive with a new 7200rpm.

    Also, a Factory Restore might help. Even a Defrag might help.
     
    ahl395, Nov 17, 2008
    #3
  4. namaiki

    namaiki "basically rocks" Super Moderator

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    namaiki, Nov 17, 2008
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  5. K-TRON

    K-TRON Hi, I'm Jimmy Diesel ^_^

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    It sounds like your disc is set to PIO mode, try changing it back to DMA mode.

    If the drive is in DMA mode, than you probably have a ton of processes running in the background.
    Go to the start button, go to the run command, and type in MSCONFIG.
    Than shut off any processes, and services you do not use, in the startup and services tabs.
    I suggest shutting off as many processes as you can. You should have less than 30 processes at idle if your operating system is XP.

    K-TRON
     
    K-TRON, Nov 17, 2008
    #5
  6. roland_j

    roland_j Notebook Consultant

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    will check when i get home from class
     
    roland_j, Nov 17, 2008
    #6
  7. Phil

    Phil Retired

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    I think so too.

    There's also a possibility for some malware/virus.

    Also run a diskcheck to see if your HDD is ok.
     
    Phil, Nov 18, 2008
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  8. Cheffy

    Cheffy Notebook Evangelist

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    +1 on the DMA check. This is often caused by communication errors between the controller and windows - after several failures, an IDE device is often switched to PIO mode by default. However there still could be an underlying hardware issue that caused this. The easiest way to deal with this is to enter the device manager and check under the primary ide device. It probably will not allow you to change it to DMA mode, so simply remove the primary ide device under device manager and restart the laptop. If there is no underlying hardware issue, it should restart fine. Otherwise, I'd suspect either a problem with the HDD or the built-in IDE controller. If it's hardware based, let's hope it's the former.
     
    Cheffy, Nov 18, 2008
    #8