Help What's Wrong With My Laptop!!!

For some reason in the last hour or two but it has gotten bad. Not only has the whole laptop slowed down but it has frozen a few times and when I try to install UT3 demo it takes about 10 mins just to pull up the install screen....

 

Is your hard drive light constantly lit?

 

Yeah a lot of the time

 

Disable Windows Search in msconfig, reboot and give Windows a few mins to fill the SuperFetch cache before you start gaming or otherwise running system intensive tasks. It usually takes Vista a couple of days to learn your computing habits, at that point you will see a huge decrease in system utilization. Also, have you optimized your startup programs yet?

 

how? where is that

 

start, type in "msconfig", hit enter, click "services" tab and sort alphabetically. Scroll down to Windows Search and uncheck, click apply, ok and reboot. Make sure you check the box to not show again.

 

No, I've only had the laptop for a few days, when it start running fast again?

 

Just start with what I suggested above. You should notice the change immediately after a reboot. Also, you are probably still running the Norton Trial, which is installed by Gateway. This thing is the epitome of a system hog. My suggestion to you is completely uninstall that and download/install Avira in its place. That will also make a dramatic difference.

 

Not sure why someone would suggest that you disable Search without even knowing if indeed search is the process that is eating cpu cycles and lighting up the hard drive. That is nothing more than a guess.

The REAL thing you ought to do is first find out what is causing the problem. Get a copy of Sysinternals Process Explorer Process Explorer Info and find out what is hogging the CPU, then armed with actual information ask again here about what you should do next.

Gary

 

Its a lot more than a guess, its a widely known fact. And one of the main reasons disabling search indexing is in just about all the non-bs Vista tweak guides. Its has been proven that Search Indexing (along with SuperFetch) tears away at cpu cycles, as well as thrashes the hard drive. Feel free to check me on this as there are too many articles to link here. I don't recommend disabling SuperFetch as much, however, as it actually makes up for its initial "discomfort" with faster program loads. I have been dealing with Vista since back in Alpha stages and although I certainly don't know everything, I've learned quite a bit and don't give suggestions that are a "best guess" that could possibly do more damage than good.

And BTW, disabling Windows Search, does NOT disable searching. It only disables the background service that caches files for faster search results. Short of slower search results, there is virtually no negative to disabling this service. The performance gain more than makes up for the extra second or two waiting for search results. A lot of users dont even use search.

 

The FACT that is widely known about Vista's search function is that once it completes its initial index of the drive that it takes up very little resources. The other FACT is that the background process is NOT caching search results, it is indexing new or changed files on the system. "Short of slower search results there is no negative effect"??? That is the ONLY effect, the entire point of the service is to allow quick searches. And the alleged performance gain is as yet unproven... only anecdotal.

After the initial indexing is done, the background process does nothing at all until a file is changed or added, and even then it does nothing if the file is not in a directory under indexing's purview. The guides that I have seen and respect, have suggested limiting the indexing function to only those directories where the user might need to do a full text search. Typically, this would be the user's "my documents" folders and their Outlook PST files.

But my real problem with the suggestion to the OP was that it was done in without a single bit of investigation to see if indexing was the source of the problem. Without that investigation it was, as I said initially, nothing more than a guess. If the initial indexing was not complete, it might very well have been indexing that was the culprit. (And the better solution to this would be to let the machine run overnight to let the indexing complete.) If it was complete, there is very little to indicate that indexing is the issue. But again, without any investigation we both are guessing, which is why I suggested that the OP find out what process IS hogging the system.

Gary

 

Thank you for your input.