Extremely slow laptop

V

vizo

New Member
I recently got around to trying to get my sisters old laptop to start working again but Im having a bit of trouble finding out the problem.

Its a near 4 year old HP Pavilion ZE1115. The specs, as far as I can remember include a 1.1ghz Duron, 20 gig WD HDD [5400 possibly] and 256MB of PC133. She first started having problems with it when she first got it. It would only show half of the full 1.1ghz in the System Properties and always seemed to be sluggishly slow on absolutely everything.

The same applies today.. it takes ages for the thing to boot up and shut down, tasks and active windows become unresponsive for about 5 minutes until they unfreeze and is just plain slow in every way. I reformatted the drive and tried reinstalling Windows XP earlier and the installation just plain stopped and got stuck on 36%, even when those lame "Welcome to Windows" description screens kept cycling over and over and over. I even rebooted and it still got stuck at 36 or 37%. The "CDrom access" light wasnt flashing at all either.

What is the most logical problem here? Possibly a bad hard drive since everything is slow? Bad memory since not more than one thing can happen before the system bogs down? The CPU since it usually only shows ~500mhz in the System Properties window?

Any suggestions are more than welcome...
 
The system is throttling most likely, it's not going to run at 1.1GHz 24/7. To save battery life it down clocks and runs at it's lowest level, until you open a program or soemthing, then it speeds up, waitis till you idle again, and then slows down. This is normal. To turn that off look for that feature in the BIOS.

You can run memtest86 to see if all your memory is good and not causign errors. You can also run a chkdsk to see if your harddrive has any bad sectors/blocks. Google either of those for a free download, they both contain readme's i believe that can tell you in detail exactly how to run them.
 
Viruses already installed right out of the box? He said it had problems from the very beginning, so I'm thinking that's not it. Also I don't know of many viruses that prohibit the install of an OS. Simple malware will lay dormant until the OS is installed I thought. I'd suggest checking for viruses, but without the OS...you can't with ordinary AV.
 
4W4K3 said:
The system is throttling most likely, it's not going to run at 1.1GHz 24/7. To save battery life it down clocks and runs at it's lowest level, until you open a program or soemthing, then it speeds up, waitis till you idle again, and then slows down. This is normal. To turn that off look for that feature in the BIOS.

You can run memtest86 to see if all your memory is good and not causign errors. You can also run a chkdsk to see if your harddrive has any bad sectors/blocks. Google either of those for a free download, they both contain readme's i believe that can tell you in detail exactly how to run them.
Click to expand...

Im not using the battery though, Im using the power adapter. I have never seen a laptop lower its CPU speed by half :confused: Also, the HP BIOSes are very limited.. as in the only options being Time and Date and Boot Order

I would try the memtester but Windows wont install at the moment. Also, I highly doubt that its virii or malware or anything of that nature, because as you said, Ive been having problems with it since I got it, and AV software has always been installed.

EDIT: Burning a memtest bootdisk, trying chkdsk too, ill report when its done
 
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4W4K3 said:
Viruses already installed right out of the box? He said it had problems from the very beginning, so I'm thinking that's not it. Also I don't know of many viruses that prohibit the install of an OS. Simple malware will lay dormant until the OS is installed I thought. I'd suggest checking for viruses, but without the OS...you can't with ordinary AV.
Click to expand...

he said it's about 4 years old.
 
jp198780 said:
he said it's about 4 years old.
Click to expand...

The hardware is, none of it has been replaced yet. The system has been reformatted about 10 times since then in hopes of getting it working.
 
Well I guess my only point was, that without an OS...the majority of any malware is going to be useless. No internet scan or software scan available to us is of any good, as it requires the OS to be installed.

It seems as if you figured out the bootdisk method, that's what I intended to suggest. Hopefully those will bring results. Nothing easier than replacing a bad RAM stick and haing all your problems solved :P
 
Memtest was run and had 2 successful passes without any errors. The memory doesnt seem to be the problem so Ill coninue to run more tests on UBCD.

EDIT: The HDD was making this weird 5 second stuttering sound over and over when it got stuck during the installation process. Ill go buy a new HDD today and see if thats the problem. I did a Burn In test on Powermax and it passed.

This is getting annoying.
 
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It was the hard drive, it finally gave in and gave me some error codes after scanning and scanning.

Should I email HP and ask which drives work best with their notebooks or would someone here know? Thanks.
 
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