Pavilion dv6000 w/ vista: Solid HD light crash

Earlier tonight I was helping a friend clean out her Pavilion dv6000, which was running very slowly due to spyware. Well, I got most of the spyware cleared, and the machine seems to run better, but there is still one big problem that remains.

The problem is that the HD light will suddenly glow solid, and the computer will become very slow and unresponsive, and eventually will totally freeze. Despite this, I hear no "clicking" sound coming from the HD. Weird.

This happened twice during a Spybot: S&D Scan (At the exact same time, too!),

This happened when I tried to import things from IE to Firefox.

After that, it happens every time I try to launch Firefox.

It seems to happen a lot when I'm running the Windows task manager. The CPU usage isn't all that high when it's doing this, but the Mem usage is extremely high (over 600 MB, and the Machine only has 1GB RAM).

My only guess is there's still some spyware on the machine that I missed. I do not have the time tonight to reformat the drive, so if there's any other suggestions on how to solve this problem (and hopefully make the machine run faster, besides upgrading the RAM), just reply to this thread.

 

Could also be an issue with the hard drive, so i would run a test in the BIOS for the hard drive. To go there, Turn off notebook, turn it on and start tapping F11 then when in bios move over to diagnostics, then run the hard drive test. It will run a quick two minute test and then it will do a comprehensive test which can take from 40 min to two hours, depending on your hard drive size.

 

I was beginning to wonder about that myself. However, it only seems to do this when the machine is under a heavy load (i.e. vista). And the fact that it did it twice during a spybot S&D scan at the exact same spots make me think otherwise. But, it's still a possibility. I might just get HDTune and check the SMART attributes and see if they're in check.

 

Watch the temps to see if their in the 40-50c range

Most likely a spyware or corrupted OS in my opinion. Do a clean install if possible

 

i feel as if the spyware corrupted the OS as well.

if the OS is Vista, then 600MB sounds normal. check the "msconfig" and disable anything odd and not needed.