Everything takes too much time!

Hi folks.

My laptop ( Dell Inspiron N5110 ) was fine until yesterday when it fell off the table, but it wasn't a big fall, I mean I tried to prevent it from touching the ground and I succeeded. Basically it just hit my body.

After that I found that my wireless mouse isn't working so I restarted the laptop, and it got stuck at starting windows. I tried to install Windows 7 and it took 6 hours to finish ( instead of 45 minutes ). And now it's taking an hour to install a simple driver instead of 3 minutes.

The strange thing is, basic actions like browsing harddisk and opening windows applications is done easily. While installing stuff takes forever.

I did a harddisk test, a ram test and a cpu test ( hiren's boot cd ) and everything seemed fine.

Internet works fine after about half an hour installing wireless driver. I don't what could it be, I tried everything you can imagine, from BIOS settings to even hitting the keyboard!

 

What was the hard drive test? Did you try a defrag? Hard drives don't like sudden movement. I would do more HDD tests and look at the SMART data.

Also try to do some system benchmarks. Find out where the hold up is. Try reseating the memory, and anything else you can reseat, like the hard drive, optical drive, everything you can reseat.

 

I would say open up the laptop and make sure the components were not jarred loosed in the impact that would be first to check on that. And then swap the HDD for another and see what the re-installation time is shorter or longer and that would tell you if the drive is bad or will go bad as a result of the impact. Remember what looks small to you is large to laptop - even small drops.

 

When the computer fell off the table, was it powered on? It is possible that the hard disk was damaged, how long does it take for Windows to start up now that it has been re-installed. As others have already said, I would try another disk if you have a spare handy.

 

If that is so then it did take a damage to the HDD when it was on. Being on and falling off would do some kinda of damage big or small it will do some damage to a HDD being off would have a better chance to survive the fall to prevent damage from happening. Otherwise you need to redo or get a better table so the next time it won't happen again. When you install windows it shouldn't take more then couple min at the most in my instances to get going any longer would mean the mechanisms in the HDD got damage in the fall and is having problems. But the best test would be to get another matching HDD and format that and try to boot and if that goes faster then the case would be that your HDD will fail and you stand the chance of loosing all your file/data not a good end result. But remember boot up time will vary sometimes depending on your setup and hardware/software installation but if from your past experiences using the same computer and notice there is more considerable time to get booted other then what it did in the past when everything was new and after you reformatted it would indicate problem in the HDD itself from the fall since it was "ON" during the fall.