Extremely slow XP laptop

[Steve Smith]

I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop running Windows XP Home that has suddenly started working EXTREMELY SLOWLY. It's as if I'm running XP on an old 386 with 16MB memory. The computer has a 1Ghz CPU and 256MB memory. It takes it 10 to 15 minutes to open MS Word. Sometimes it takes 5 minutes for the menu to appear after I click on the Start button. It takes it almost 10 minutes to boot. What could be causing this?

I've tried the following to no avail:
Updated virus definitions and scanned for viruses and found none.
Restored back to a Restore Point that was created during a time that the computer was running good.
Downloaded all Windows Updates.
Booted into Safe Mode. It didn't help and it appeared to run even slower.
Ran Norton System Works. Found some problems and they were fixed but it didn't solve the "slow" problem.
Removed unnecessary startup programs. Didn't help either
Downloaded Dell's diagnostic program for this laptop and tested all the hardware overnight. Everything passed!
Ran PC Certify(a third party hardware diagnostic program that is booted off of a DOS floppy) overnight and everything passed.
Re-installed Windows Xp and selected the second Repair option so it would save my files and settings. It took several hours to install and when it was done, it was still just as slow.
Downloaded the Hitachi hard drive diagnostics and tested the hard drive. Hard drive passed fine.

Does anyone have any ideas? I guess the next step is to reformat and re-install Windows but I was hoping to avoid this.

Thanks,
Steve Smith

[Steve Smith]

I've determined that the hard drive is bad. I made this determination by "Ghosting" to a different hard drive and then replacing the suspect drive with the Ghosted drive. It runs great with the new hard drive. For whatever reason the old hard drive passed Dell's diagnostic program for this laptop, PC Certify diagnostic software and the IBM's "Fitness Test" hard drive diagnostics. I even did a low level format and a clean install of Windows but that didn't help. A replacement hard drive worked like a charm. I guess you can't always trust hard drive diagnostic software.

Perhaps it's possible for a hard drive to slow down because of mechanical reasons maybe due to bad bearings or something and maybe this doesn't get tested by drive diag software or "SMART" analysis. Has anyone seen this problem before?

Steve Smith

[Michael Hawes]

>Does anyone have any ideas? I guess the next step is to reformat and
re-install >Windows but I was hoping to avoid this.

Have you checked for adware/spyware? Download adaware from
www.lavasoftusa.com and run it. Open task manager and see if a process is
using all CPU time, then trace it on google and disable remove as required.

Mike.




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[Steve Smith]

Michael Hawes Have you checked for adware/spyware? Download adaware from www.lavasoftusa.com and run it. Open task manager and see if a process is using all CPU time, then trace it on google and disable remove as required.

Thanks, but this problem was far worst than adware/spyware could cause and I did check for it and remove it. See my original post for details.

Steve Smith