DV9700T - brand new, slow and unresponsive

My new DV9700T arrived about a month ago. Thanks to a bad router which caused me to spend a lot of extra time setting up my home network, plus some work obligations, it has only been these last 2-3 weeks I've really had a chance to turn my attention to the new laptop.

As I began using it, I noticed that Windows started to run very slowly. The cursor moved around at normal speed, and once I opened a browser window the internet loaded at normal speed. But I would click to open a program, and it would take a few minutes to open, if at all.

Since the laptop was still new and hadn't been too customized yet, I decided to skip right to Recovery Manager to restore to factory settings. That helped for a few days, but then Windows became sluggish and unresponsive again. I was prepared to call HP for a new copy of Windows.

That's when I started hearing a clicking sound. Actually it's more like three very quick clicks in succession. I can't tell for sure, but it sounds like it's coming from the front left of the laptop, near the touchpad.

Does this sound like it might a hard drive failure? The clicks aren't as metallic-sounding as some of my desktop hard drive failures have sounded, so I'm having a hard time identifying.

Either way, am I safe in assuming that at this point that my best option is just to call HP? I don't want to sink a lot more time into troubleshooting if I'm going to have to send it back anyway.

 

yea, to the side of your touchpad is normally where your hard drive is located. Might want to try a defrag right after you oinstall windows? I remember my hard drive was clicking once in a while, i defragged it, and it went away. So, who knows. Goodluck though!

 

Honest question...would I really need to defrag a brand new hard drive? I've done almost nothing to this computer, besides downloading a firewall, Firefox, and deleting some of the crapware that came with it.

 

The main thing I always tell people when they purchase a laptop is to do a clean install. Check the stickies located here in the HP section and do a clean install. You will notice the increase in performance and speed. It's amazing how much all the crap that comes with personal computers slows them down, you'll be amazed at the speed of your laptop once you do a clean install. Also, I don't know how much RAM you have, but I always recommend at least 2GB or more of RAM with Vista.

 

i would say...run a chkdsk on that drive using surface scan. chances are...the hard drive has a few bad sectors in the data area of drive. if this is the case...have the drive replaced.

 

As far as defragging goes, its always good to defrag after a large amount of data is added or removed. An operating system is a large amount of data. I know with windows xp, when you install it...it dosnt' all install in one good place on the disk. You can check out the defrag too or some other defrag tool, and see that the data is prettmuch scattered no matter how fresh the hard drive is. But thats just my experience.

 

usually what we do is we clean install Windows when we get the laptop. but i think you should use your warranty and get a new hard drive

 

The members have offered quite a few good options here. I had this issue with a DV9700T "loaner". I didn't download any beyond what was an update.
I did the defrag a couple of time, which took quite a while so don't let the it got to sleep, hibernate or turnn off while it is doing its job (check settings).
I cleaned up the disk (same page as defrag) and checked the hard drive (hard drive test) the quick way and the long way, both passed.
New with 3 GB, I think it should work fine and not suddenly bog down and freeze with several apps open, it should continue to work fine. The Vista SP1 update came out so I downloaded that too (also takes a while) and now it is running better and faster. Basically, I did the first tier/obvious solutions and it's worked.

 

just go into the BIOS (F10 during boot) and then move over to diagnostics, and then run the Primary HDD test. Give us the results.