Sony acting very very very slow

hi this thread is more for the benifite of my friend who is haveing a problem with his sony vaio laptop computer

first and for most is very very slow, sometimes taking 10minutes just to get into the login screen, and sometimes just as long after his password is entered.
most of the time is spent when xp is loading(it sits on the screen for a majority of the time), the one with the blue bar thing, and windows xp logo.

he has sent the computer already to sony because of a hard drive failure and it was doing this before it was sent in, on return it still did it.

i keep telling him we need to format and reinstall, but he says he can't because of certain files, or something like that...

his system
Sony Vaio(not sure of model)
15.4 inch widescreen
80gb hdd(default formatting Fat32 or ntfs not sure)
512 mb ram,
xp home
had for 3 months...
intel Centrio PM 1.73ghz

so the question is, is there any way to to fix it with out formatting the hdd. or can some one at least tell me what it wrong with it!!!!

my system(below) can be shut down and rebooted 5 times before his will load at all.

thanks in advance and any help is appreciated!

 

hi, have u tried looking @ this thread (<a>http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=5787[/URL]) and seeing if those steps help speed it up?

 

his computer is unteaked, and so is mine also my computer has gone 1.3 years with out a format, where his was purchased in june, i also have 2 times as much junk on my hdd, and i load alot more stuff on startup than he does(on startup i am using 86% of my ram) i am at 93% now, he does have really anything loading other than windows and norton so not much to turn off with msconfig. as well it is the slowest after bios is loaded(right after sony screen) that it gets very slow.
1.73ghz PM vs Celeron M 370 1.5ghz

should not the pentium M slaughter the celeron??

 

i am serious this then is very very very very very slow.

i lost count after 40 on the windows loading screen, 40 being the number of times the blue boxes pass across the loading bar...
i think mine only takes 8-9times.

 

So, you DID scan for spyware, adware, viruses, and disable extraneous startup items/services?

If so, then upgrade RAM.

 

hmm...yes the PM should be quicker than a Celeron...there could be a few things bogging down his system during startup...also how's the fragmentation of the hard drive like? that could have something to do with it...i can suggest a few steps tho :

check the prefetch folder and clear it out (c:\windows\prefetch)...

defrag the hard drive

do a virus/spyware/adware system scan to make sure that it's clean

clean out the msconfig for all the junk programs that you don't think you need for it to load up...

and then try some of the tweakings done in that link i mentioned above...

i'll be surprised if all of this doesn't speed up the system...

 

the system is not defaged but it is virus/spyware free. it takes way to long to defagment... days and days. when he comes over i will try some of the mentioned tricks but, i don't know how much faster that could really make his system, take into acount how slow it is... can it really speed it up 20 minutes in load time???? the ram is the same, in both computers so upgrading the ram likely would not help. as that is what i have in mine and it runs fast(for a cel m)

i think there might be something wrong with the hdd. but i don't know...

oh my load time is 55 seconds to login screen his can take up to 20minutes!?

 

should i encourage him to format again?

 

if the above steps don't work then i'm pretty stumped at how else you can speed it up any more...if all else fails then a reformat generally fixes a lot of problems...if he needs to back up files put them on the D: drive since i think most if not all VAIOs come as partitioned in2 2 drives (that way he can keep his files when he does a system restore)...when you do the system restore just make sure it's not the destructive restore (i.e. just wipe the C: drive to how it was when it came outta the box...) otherwise it will delete everything in both C: and D: drives...

 

i figured the only solution is to completely wip it, what he wants to protect is a program called kurzwell, which he needs a school teci to install(not hard they just will not give him the disk).

thanks for the help everyone

majestic, it stumped me too, how can it be soooo slow, remeber this thing is takeing the better part of a half hour just to boot. yikes! my Pentium 1 doesn't take that long!

thanks for all your help everyone!

 

just get a cheap external drive or something for all his impportant files

 

This same problem happened with my Vaio. I had changed some network settings to exchange some files wirelessly with a friend. The next time I booted up, it took a very very long time for explorer to load.

I went to the Sony store and no one knew what was wrong so they gave me a new one. Unfortunately, the same thing happened with the new unit. So I just did a fresh install and have kept my wireless settings at default to avoid the problem.

 

I suggest uninstalling Norton & use free antivirus (Avast or AVG), spyware (Adaware, Spybot) & firewall (Zone Alarm or Comodo) programs. I think using Norton may be the cause as it is a resourse hog. I have similar long boot time issues with McAfee Security Suite. Man that thing just cause the whole system to literally "hang." Took forever to totally load Windows especially when McAfee starts up when loading into Windows, you can't do anything!

I'll also suggest like the others to run antivirus, spyware check as well as to defrag the harddrive & if possible upgrade RAM to 1gb. Those should help & hope it helps too. Good luck.

 

Hi, I have a sony vaio as well just that mine is the FS model. I am a computer technician and I had never ran into this problem before, and after analyzing my computer after a day I checked the memory, and the memory tests just fine. I also ran a diagnostics for the hardrive and it passed very well. From my experience a hard drive problem does not make a computer act this slow. The symptoms for a bad hard drive are a noisy hard drive, or simply not being detected during the boot up sequence. Memory problems also dont usually exert this behavior as well. Bad memory never causes a computer to be this slow, they usually cause errors when running software, a random blue screen, or the system not booting at all.

I am still in the process of repairing my computer. But up to this point I have observed that my laptop's fan does not come on as it normally would. As a matter of fact they never turn on at all. This leads me to believe that there is either something wrong with the fan or the control system that controls when the fans turn on or off. Having bad cooling leads to bad performance, and thus the extreeeeeeeeemely slow computer. So my best guess is that, bad cooling due to a bad fan, bad fan controller, or bad motherboard or processor.