Hello all, For no apparent reason a laptop I have (Dell Latitude D520) had started to run very slowly. Startup used to take less than a minute to usable desktop now it's taking about 2 minutes just to get past the windows splash, I would say it's about 4 minutes to fully usable desktop! Then when trying to perform tasks such as unzip a large file it runs very slow (despite being a dual core). Also now sound won't play normally (be that a music file or the sound in a video, any sound), it skips and jumps, video seems to play pretty fine though after starting a little slowly. I have no idea why this has happened, laptop has worked fine up until now and I'm stumped about this. Ran a scandisk with repairs and that took forever but nothing found, ran a defrag plus defrag of the offline files and boot sector with perfectdisk 2008, also took absolutely forever (literally 10 hours) but the system is still running superbly slow. Any ideas?
do you have any usb pendrives/ sd cards plugged-in at all times? You might also remove any antispyware software that you might have installed to see if that is slowing your computer down. When I had webroot spywaresweeper installed that slow down my computer tremendously. I'm not sure if this applys to laptops, but see if you can check and make sure that the hard drive is set to DMA instead of PIO. If set to PIO that will slowdown the entire computer.
You say you ran defrag programs, did you also use the disk cleanup application that comes with windows? Better yet, download CCleaner and run disk cleanup, then switch to registry and fix those issues?
Thanks for your replies. No pen drives or any removable drives of any kind. No anti spwyware (or any software at all) recently installed, this just happened all of a sudden. Don't think the drive is set to pio, it wouldn't be anyway since no settings changed but I'll check that. I regularly use ccleaner's disk and registry cleaners on all my machines so that hasn't helped.
Just ran memtest for a while, 4 full passes no errors. Uninstalled sound and graphics drivers, problem remains. When burning cd/dvd it constantly empties the buffer and has to wait for it to fill, like the old days... I'll give it a couple of hours then I'm re-installing windows. I suspect it's a hardware error, like something is seriously wrong with the hardrive (although that's not making any funny noises) that any of the programs can't detect.
Haven't actually re-installed yet since I'm away from the laptop now. Anyone have any last comments or suggestions? Would be much appreciated. thanks.
