When Good Laptops turn bad

R

rich.n

New Member
Okay. I have inherited an Acer travelmate 4074WLMi. It has a triple partition on FAT32. Runs XP home and Pro and one swap drive. The hard disk was playing up, and the laptop would crash, then windows scandisk would kick in next boot and temporarily fix the files (invalid file sizes, files cross referenced etc) I tried finding a program that would check the allocation table, but google came up with plenty of disk repair programs to fix specific files.
Any Ideas on that are much appreciated.

Also now the laptop is very slow. CPU is running at 60-99% (in the performance tab) even though task manager processes tab says that 99% of CPU is idle. Also playing music, the music will loop occasionly or slow right down, so it sounds jerky and lower pitched. Drivers are fine according to windows. I expect that it is due to more hardware faults.
If you are still reading please help.
 
I had this problem with my TravelMate 2492WLMi. I had to format the disk into NTFS from FAT32. I had a 60gb HDD, partitioned 3 times. One is 25.2gb (acer), one 25.7gb (acer data) and the other was 4.8gb (backup). Once I had formatted the two main drives, Acer (C:\) and Acer Data (D:\) to the NTFS file system, they worked fine. Do you have any large files, eg over 2gb music, or films between the range of 650mb -2gb? FAT32 only supports a max file size of 2gb, and this makes it slower processing. You should be able to format the HDD to NTFS without loosing data, but consult a specialist.

You could try downloading and installing PartionMagic Demo 7.0, it will allow you to 'upgrade' your HDD's file system, apparently without loosing the stored data, but I'd take a backup, just to be sure. It may also be worth checking that both of the operating systems are not running at the same time. I take it, you have C:\, D:\ and E:\ in the form of partitions. If so, run the OS on C:\ and disable D:\ and E:\. Use google to find out how to do this, because its been a while since I did it.
 
It solved most of my problems, but I needed to re-download all of my video and audio codecs, and this being 3 years ago and having dialup was not fun. Once you have removed and reinstalled the video and audio drivers and codecs it should run perfectly fine. My CPU was constantly running at 100%, but when I did this, it now runs on average at 20% (probably two OS'es and server software), but it does go up a bit when editing videos or seriously multitasking. Hope this solves your problem, but please make a backup first. Somewhere like xDrive would be ideal, and download their desktop client to backup entire sections of your PC. If not, DVD's and external HDD's will do (especially if you have slow internet).
 
azwebs,
im guessing those computer specs are your wet dream or youre incredibly rich, and not 13.
(sorry, completely irrelevant to the topic, i just had to point that out...)
 
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