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It's grinding to a halt - takes an hour to boot up.

First thing is I'm a jerk when it comes to this.

Second is that I read that if a file is operating that it can't usually be removed. So a good routine is to go into "Safe Mode" to get the buggers out.

Need more info:

System specs: Pentium? Memory? etc
What operating system?
How much free disk space?
How many apps being loaded on boot? (If windows, do you have a lot of icons in the systray on the bottom right of the start bar?)

Give us something to work with ;)

1- Use disk cleanup to remove temporary files
2- Defragment your hard drive
3- Make sure you now have enough space on the hard drive. Otherwise, free enough space to increase the virtual memory.
4- Do you have enough ram? add if necessary.
5- If none of this works, do a crtl-alt-del and look at the processes running. There may be some virus or spyware using most of the processor power.
6- If you indentify such a power consumming process, try to stop it. If you cannot stop it, or if it restarts right away, it could be a virus. Do a search on google to find a program to clean it.

Aurel

A word of advice - save your temper and stress - find a small friendly computer shop nearby - show them these replies -ask them to do it - will cost next to nothing compared to what it will cost in your time and stress!
I have been working on computers since 1967 and from your replies you need a computer shop - or a very knowledgable neighbour - is there anyone at work who is known as a geek?.
If you have the time it would be worth a night school course too.

It looks like you have 256 mb of ram. That is not much. You could add a 512 Mb stick. But for now, you should right click on C, go to properties, and click disk cleanup. After the cleanup, do the same thing, but click tools and defragment. That should help....

Aurel

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
removes spyware, viruses, trojans, etc.

Hi,

I'm in partly cloudy So.Cal... I happen to small friendly "computer shop", would be glas to help. You can also try this link. You must use Internet Explorer.

http://www.pandasoftware.com/products/ActiveScan.htm

I use it alot when I am in the field and can't hook the trouble machine up to another to scan. Pasnda Soft is pretty good at catching virii and spyware the rest miss... Post any questions...

Dave

TMproxy and TMOagent means that you are running Trend Micro which is a good thing. That's currently the best of the virus progs out. PCCguide and PCCclient is PC-cillin antivirus software. You only need 1, I'd probably ditch that one and keep the Trend Micro. 256 isn't much, but should be enough. Pentium 4 should be darn speedy. You have a few things running that you don't need, but that shouldn't be causing a problem like qttask (memory resident Quicktime), realsched, WZQKPICK (winzip in the taskbar). I'd kill those, but they shouldn't be causing a problem. Most of the rest is either part of windows, a device driver/app, or virus stuff.

To see how much free space you have, go to "My Computer" and click "view" --> "detailed". You should then see a list of your drives (among other things) listing how much used and free space they have. You probably want a minimum of 1Gig of free space with only 256Mb RAM.

When did your computer start running slow? Did it change suddenly after you installed something, suddenly for no apparent reason, or did it gradually get slower and slower.

When you look at the list of processes running do you see any that are using a lot of processor usage (next to how much memory they are using)?

Good luck.

did you try defrag'ing?

You may want to give Dave (above) a shot. I'd tend to trust most people that are on this board. But I'd be warry of small or large computer places. I'm sure there are plenty that are more than competent and honest, but there are probably just as many crooked or incompetent computer repair places out there as there are crooked car repair places. places like Compusa are paying kids $7. I've known a few people that had work done by small independents that I've later had to clean up. I'm no expert, but I have built a couple of computers from scratch that ran very well and I'm competent with software.

Gone into the BIOS setup menus lately? Accidently changing settings there can definitely cause the exact type problem you're having.

Hi,

I do this type of work everyday in my day job, just also, happen to moon-light in the hopes of leaving my day job and doing this sort of stuff full time on my own. Almost there...... Been in the industry for a long time.

I can pass on some refs. if you'd like...

Dave

Hey... if this computer is 3.5 years old you need to do one thing to help it out.

Format the hard drive and start over. What is the OS on it now? W98SE I bet? Pls do not say Windows Millinum (or however they spell it) ...

I format my drive ever year to clean out all the crap that is loaded and then not deleted. Try W2000 or XP as an OS. If you are not that comfortable doing it take it to a computer shop and have them do it. Will make a world of difference.

Until you do something like format the HD, defrag at least every couple of weeks. As well do a complete virus check (with updated info) every week at the minimum. I do it every night while asleep.

JoeA

Hi SoCal911SC,

Good to hear Pandasoft could help you out. Make sure to run Windows update as well.

Dave

Dave, I definitely wasn't trying to cast doubt on you. Like I said, I'd tend to trust people on the board. It's the other random people that you run into everyday. I was directing my post to StevoRocket's post earier, not yours.

I agree with updating the OS. Back-up the stuff you want to save up and install XP. Also, with the prices of memory I'd abolutely get a Gig of memory in there. You either have one 256MB or two 128MB Sticks in there. For less than $100 (Non-ECC) you can get Gig and enjoy the performance jump.

If you have the Dell Model number we can help you out with selecting the proper memory.

Agree about memory but lots of the older laptops do not take a lot of memory. One of my older units will accept only 256.

If you want it to go faster, update the OS, max out the memory and get a 5400 min hard drive. A 7200 rpm drive will help more but they still cost a bit...

JoeA

Hi masraum,

I'm not offended or hurt. Was a quick attempt to try and self promote :) and that this is what I do this on a professional level, not like the rest of the "computer guys".

Take care!

Dave

Is there any chance the harddrive is full? That will cause it to run slow and crash. For a 3.5 year old laptop, I wouldn't spend money upgrading, you can probably buy new for less. If you have no files to lose, and the original system disks, format the hard drve and re-install system from scratch.

Or you could use it to 'play' with linux.

Do you by chance have the Windows 2000 disk? At this point a repair install would probably be the quickest way to get your system sorted out. It's not a lost cause if you don't so don't worry.

Here is a standalone virus scanner offered by McAfee. Stinger Try this and report back.

I think that something during the defrag caused the problem, but I'm not sure what. I doubt it's a virus issue.

Open up task manager again (Ctrl+Alt+Del or right click on the start bar and select "task manager"), resize the window so that the whole list of running processes is visable, and take a screeshot (Alt+Print Screen (Prt Scrn)), open up your image program, select file -> new, and press Ctr+V to paste the screenshot in, select file->save as, and post the image here.

P.S. Quit being such an instigator to the newbs who ask about V8 conversions in the Tech forum :p

Rebooting possibly allowed the trojan/virus to reload itself.
Machines which have not been defragged for some time take a long time to complete the defrag. I have a windows 2000 machine with a lot less free space than yours which takes ages to defrag too - but only if it has not been defragged for months.
Shut off the screen saver and any other programs which you run before running the defrag - otherwise it spends a lot of time scanning the disk from the beginning every few minutes.

One other problem can be disk errors - its always worth running a dskchk (disk error check) before running a defrag on older machines.

Lol, well that's one way to take a screenshot. Ok, when you say your machine is slow, what are you trying to do when it's going slow. Is it slow launching applications or slow running them, or is it just your internet browsing is slow?

So you have some info, you have no suspect processes running and your definitely not CPU bound - 99% idle.

Hi,

Most of the warranty Toshiba laptop's I work on have a poor cooling design. The cooling fans pull air in from the bottom and really suck in the dust, cat hair, etc. and block the radiator. I don't remember how Dell's work, but is the laptop getting very warm? Does the fan turn on at all?

A long shot is that the memory is corrupt. Ask your IT guy to download a program called memtest86.

http://www.memtest86.com/

Have him burn it to CD or make a floppy. Boot it and see what happens. If mem is bad it'll show up in red giving the address and how much.

All I can think of at the moment.

Dave

My G/F had almost the exact same thing with her Dell of about the same vintage. She (thank gawd) had bought the extended warranty. 3 home visits later, they changed the motherboard for the exact same complaint. They found the cooling fan blades had shattered, replaced the fan assy. Worked OK for a week or so, same again. Then I reloaded everything after a format at their suggestion. worked for a week, then slow again. Then Dell came back to the house again and put new HD in. Worked for a week. Third try, changed out motherboard. It worked long enough for her to sell it.

Maybe it's time.

>>Have him burn it to CD or make a floppy.

Um, if your Dell does not have a floppy drive, don't bother having your IT guy making a floppy disk :-).

It's late, what'd ya expect?

Dave

That could be because of a cooling issue. When CPU gets too hot it will become very unpredictable and either shut off or reboot. Does the fan come on at all? I wonder if your CPU can report tempthrough a utility. What model is it?

Here's a Core temp utility for Dell laptops that alos reports on cooling fan performance: http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/

Ok, so we have narrowed it down to launching applications that is the slow part - this most likely means that your disk access is the bottleneck. Here is another question to further confirm that suspicion, when the computer is going slow do you here the hard drive making lots of noise (thrashing)? Does the disk access light blink or go solid in correlation to system speed?

Yep, as I was expecting. First guess is your HDD is on the outs, especially from your description of "gravel or marbles in the HDD". What can happen is that over time (especially in laptops which experience a lot of minor impacts and vibration) the hard drives heads (think record player arm and needle) get loose and skip around on the platters, causing the drive to have to find the spot (data block) it was last reading at. I would look at getting a new HDD for the laptop, unfortunately you will have to reload your operating system :( The reason you haven't heard me go along w/ the others who have suggested a fragmented file system is that all modern file systems (Fat32 or NTFS in your case) are only marginally effected by fragmentation. Your HDD was designed w/ these file systems in mind and utilizes an on-board cache to store information about where what data blocks are stored on the individual platters. If the drive is functioning properly it will only show a marginal slow down in the most fragmented of scenarios - not the massive slow down you are describing. To further show the validity of this scenario look at the last few generations of IBM laptops, they have implemented a small sensor on the bottom of the laptops that is not depressed when the laptop is not on a solid surface and in turn applies a small amount of tension to the disk heads. This greatly improves the durability of the HDD and it's ability to withstand minor impacts and vibration.

Sorry there is not a quick and easy solution to this one.

Hi,

If the HDD is bad, do back up ASAP and consider a new drive. It would not surprise me if the fan is blocked as well. Find out where the the hot air is blowing out. If the fan sounds as if it working as fast as it can, feel the air, is it very hot, does it seem like there is a nice breeze or is it fairly calm. If you have a can-o-air, carefully try and blow any dust out. Careful not tip the can and spray the liquid all over the inside of the laptop - this will do some nicee damage. Toshiba's are notorious for overheating. defrag will cause the CPU to work full bore causing loads of heat. 95% of the Toshiba's that come in with similar problems have a nice carpet of dust on the copper radiator. Blowing them out works. I let them run for hours after cleaning and no more random shutdown.

Dave

Depends, if you really like the computer (mine dates to 1997, no battery anymore, slow - p2 266 96 megs win2000, but is bulletproof and I deal with it). I probably would not spend the money to upgrade RAM, replace HDD and transfer or reinstall the OS and Apps.

A new laptop would give you a faster CPU, more RAM, bigger HDD. Maybe a bigger screen.

Anyway, it's up to you. Be careful with Toshiba not too many models that are good these days.

Dave

Just put a new motherboard in my Dell. Cost was $300 or so with overnight shipping. Also bought a new 80 gig HD that I am now loading with programs.

The laptop is about a year old, so is worth keeping. If it was another few years older would not spend the money on a motherboard. A hard drive cost around $100 so is well worth it.

JoeA

try ebay....

search for laptops - $250 dollars should sort it - xp software , word, excel etc.

example
http://cgi.ebay.com/DELL-C600-FAST-P3-1-0GIG-DVD-UPGRADEABLE-TO-WIRELESS-NR_W0QQitemZ6813454712QQcategoryZ3713QQrdZ1QQcmdZV iewItem

Or like I said - save the stress and see your local computer shop.
SmileWavy

First of all...Do not format your hard drive before you back up to an external drive, any and all files/programs you want to save. If you do you will blow away everything on your hard drive. I don't think you want to do that.....

As mentioned here, you may have a thermal problem....

Turn off the computer...let it sit for a while.

Elevate the computer so as to have air flow both on top and bottom. If you have a small fan, all the better to enhance cooling.

Run your Anti-Virus program again.

Clear all your temp files found in windows. (Windows explorer, windows, temp) If you haven't cleared this file is a while...it will probably have hundreds of files in there....Clean them out....

Clear your Temporary Internet files (From the internet: Tools, Internet Options: click to delete cookies and also those temporary internet files.) This will clear your previously visited internet web sites. If there are ones that you want to keep, write them down and then go back and visit their web site.

Defrag. can take literaly hours to complete.

Does win2000 have a system restore program? Check and see...You may get lucky and restore your system back to a previous date. Make sure that date coincides to when your computer was running normal.

Run Check disk (start, run, type in chkdsk, then enter)

W2K doesn't have System Restore natively.

Don't try defragging the drive again. It's like driving a car with a dying clutch in stop and go traffic. Your just gonna wear it out quicker - I already explained why your not gonna see any real performance gain from a defrag anyways.

Don't run Check Disk, same reason as above.

Do backup any data you don't want to be without. Although you mentioned most of the important data is on your other machine.

Keep the machine turned on sitting on a hard surface that will allow optimal cooling. Turn off any power saving settings that will spin down the HDD, this will also prolong the life of the HDD.