VERY problematic laptop

gazzer · Post by **gazzer** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 4:31 am

Well, my cousin has messed up her laptop, and it is as slow as (to coin Blackadder) an asthmatic ant with heavy shopping.

At first, I thought I'd isolated the problem - it seemed the agp440.sys files (or something along those lines) was causing the bootup to be really slow (taking around an hour to boot to the desktop). After following the M$ (lack of) knowledge base, it managed to get to the desktop, but then all it displayed was the background picture, and took at least 10 minutes to do everything.

I though "I know, I'll try a repair frm a Windows CD," so I popped in a CD and did a repair. Now here is the annoying part. It is now 4:30am on the 15th. I started the repair install at around 10pm on the 13th. :'(

Any ideas? Its managed to do the repair and got to the desktop, but is now just hanging there, and the little sand timer comes up whenever i move the mouse over the taskbar. Maybe it'll let me load a folder if I click it and wait for about 2 hours...!

Any ideas guys?

EDIT: It's a Toshiba T9000 if that helps.

Post by **Martyn** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 7:25 am

Do you get the same effect when booting into safe mode?

I had a similar type problem with a desktop once. This was caused by faulty sectors on the hard drive. There weren't faulty enough to get flagged as bad sectors but the sectors had to be read quite a few times before it was successful. Also the hard drive SMART system was showing a rising count.

Post by **Shotokan101** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 10:23 am

Like Martyn I suspect a flakey disk is causing multiple retries/timeouts - try booting a Linux Cd or equivalent to try to eliminate the disk as the problem and then if the CD boots o.k. and you can access the hard disk without issue then it could be reinstall windows time.......

....might also be worth trying a floppy bootable disk check util.

Post by **Shotokan101** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 10:56 am

This might be useful

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/downloads/ ... te-boot-cd

EDIT: Direct link to UBCD site

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/index.html

gazzer · Post by **gazzer** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 2:48 pm

Cheers for the suggestions guys - I am away this weekend but I will try what you have said when I get back