Weird slow down on a laptop...

[RandomFool]

I've got a laptop that's running ridiculously slow for no apparent reason. I defragged, ran Spybot, Ad-aware, even McAffe enterprise and all of them found ziltch. There's nothing unusual starting up with the PC and no strange services running. It's taking about 5 minutes to start the thing and another couple minutes after the desktop loads for any applications to run. I'm trying to avoid formatting it because it's not my laptop. Does anyone have any ideas?

-Ryan

 

[mechBgon]

1) go to Device Manager

2) find the IDE/ATAPI controllers section and expand it

3) double-click each of the controllers listed thereunder, go to the Advanced tab, and see if anything dropped from DMA mode into PIO mode. PIO mode = bad.

4) if this did happen, then you want to uninstall the whole controller and reboot, so Windows can forget about that evil, bad controller and discover a whole new wonderful controller that has miraculously appeared in its place


Any good?

 

[DigitalWanksta]

I've been having the same issue with mine -- I'm going to give this a try and see what it does for my laptop.

 

[RandomFool]

I didn't think of that. I'll give it a shot and report back witht he results. Thanks!

 

[Slikkster]

There's always the chance your cpu is being throttled down in speed, as well, which could be the result of heat buildup. You could have quite a bit of dust blocking exhaust ports or clogging up your fan.

Please state the make/model of your laptop, OP.

 

[law9933]

If you are using McAfee or Norton, I think using each's Special Removal Tool might be a fix. There is better free free programs to protect your PC.

 

[RandomFool]

It turned out that the drive was in fact using PIO for some strange reason. As soon as I removed the controller and restarted it went about 20 times fasters.

(for the record I've got McAffe Enterprise on it which only sucks up about 30 megs while running not that horrendious security center edition they sell in stores.)

Thanks for all the replies!

-Ryan