Notebook trouble

Hello,

a Polish student brought in her Acer laptop saying it takes a lot of time to boot into Win XP SP2 and the sound Windows makes when starting is totally distorted. Once booted the machine is unworkable because too slow.
I scanned the laptop using McAfee VirusScan Enterprise, Dr Web CureIt, Windows Defender, Ad-Aware, Hijack This but nothing has been found. The HD is divided into two FAT32-partitions (I would expect NTFS) and whenever it's defragged the status bar mentions also that it's being "compacted". I've never seen that before. Why compacting? Is there a link between defragging and compacting? I thought only NTFS drives could be encrypted and compressed. A checkdisk takes ages and never ends.
What could be wrong here?

Kind regards,

PeterVO

 

How is the boot time in Safe mode and have you taken a look at Event Viewer for errors mentioned ?

 

There are several things that could be affecting your laptop, so we need to know more about it. How old is this laptop? What is the make and model? Also, was the operating system upgraded from an older version, like Windows 95?

Laptops boot times seem to be affected more by the causes of slow boot up. A lot of laptop drives only spin at 5400 RPM in order to save battery life. So it is critical to have as few items in startup as possible. Unfortunatly a lot of laptops come pre-loaded with a lot of junk and this does not help.

Some other things to look at:

1) Use HijackThis to review how many items are in the startup.

2) Use Process Explorer to review what and how many processes are running when no applications are open. If you have more than 40 processes, then you need to trim those down.

3) Look at how much RAM you have. 512MB is the bare minimum.

4) Look at how full your hard disk is.

 

Hello,

the trouble is over at least for me, the student needed the laptop quickly to work on her thesis. It was still under warranty so when back in Poland she was planning to let it service.

I've never seen the "compacting" message in the statusbar when defragmenting FAT32 partitions. Defragging using Bart's PE CD gave the same result. Even in save mode it was way too slow.

Thanks for your help.

Kind regards,

PeterVO

 

I suspect a HDD that is about to fail/is corrupted w/bad sectors.

1. How much RAM onboard?
2. How much free HD space?

EDIT: I see it's out of your hands...

 

My student son had exactly the same symptoms about a month ago on his laptop. I had no idea what the problem could be as all malware scans came up negative. Probably too much P2P!!!!

First thing I tried was a system restore, which did the trick!!

 

Hello JimIT,

the HD was scanned with Spinrite but nothing was found.
The 2 partitions had 90% free space.
The video ram was shared with normal ram.
It was as if for Windows XP a part of the system partition was compacted but like I said above FAT32 was used on both partitions making compacting very strange indeed.
Making it more difficult for me was that the laptop was using a Polish version of Windows.

Kind regards,

PeterVO

 

Weird!

Oh well. Hope it worked out for her.