Laptop

   / Laptop #1  

natural

Member
Joined
Oct 8, 2005
Messages
27
Location
Elk River, MN
I have this lapttop that is about 3 months old. Daughter uses it for college. It is a Dell. Anyway she told me it was running awful slow so I cleaned up about as much as I could and then ran checkdisk. Checkdisk now has been running for over twelve hours, fixing all kinds of stuff but at this rate it will be another twelve hours before it gets done. Is the hard drive going?

J
 
   / Laptop #2  
Not necessarily </font><font color="blue" class="small">( cleaned up about as much as I could )</font> <font color="blue"> </font> Curious on your clean up method, I have always had good luck with spybot search & destroy then adaware SE(version 106)... Also do you have alot of quick start icons in the bottom right side of the desktop? If so they are all basically running in the background eating up processing power...They can cause your machine to chug down a little , and can be shutdown if needed,but they really shouldn't cause it to run excessively slow.
Generally before HD failure you may get some teltale clicking from the drive (somewhat harder to hear on laptop) or random lockups... But I will tell you, where I work we have had Dell send us quite a few warranty drives for replacement in laptops /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif probably not what you want to hear...
 
   / Laptop #3  
Sounds like you've got some program(s) running in the background that are causing checkdisk to restart time and again...
I had a similar situation a couple of years back. Not sure of your OS, but try to end any other programs that might be causing the problems before starting checkdisk and it should complete much quicker.
 
   / Laptop #4  
I agree with the other guys as well. I have had a couple of Dell's issued from work. We havent had many HD issues with ours but if you dont do the clean up ar scan often ,they take forever to complete. I also like the SpyBot program to eliminate spyware that could be running in the background. I try to use this at home once a month. I do have a silly question for you though. You arent using it to surf while its scanning are you? This would greatly slow the progress.
 
   / Laptop #5  
I was reading just a couple of weeks ago that chkdsk might take up to 48 hours to complete on large hard drives. I wouldn't worry. When it is done run Spybot and Adaware and scan for viruses and you should be all set.

Good Luck,
Kevin
 
   / Laptop #6  
This could be for the first time, but the program will give you an error that something is causing this to restart each time. If you want to check this, go to start, run, type in msconfig, and open the last tab......should be start up tab, take out anything that you have added as programs. this may help not only the scandisk, but may improve preformance all around.

I think you may have a bad hd anyway.
 
   / Laptop #7  
Good suggestion Danny.
To tell if to many processes are running. Press Ctrl, Alt and Delete keys. When the Task Manger screen comes up, look at lower left corner of screen (may have to click on process tab to bring up whats running). Thumb rule is process should be less than 40. It takes about 26 just to run windows.
Use Danny's suggestion to remove starting programs and lower number.
I have attached a view of the Task Manger screen.
791258-taskmanger.jpg
 
   / Laptop #8  
The first thing I would do is boot windows in Safe Mode. Restart the computer and press the F8 key before windows comes up. Safe mode will only start a minimum set of programs in Windows. Then run CheckDisk. Also, be careful what mode you are using in Checkdisk. Standard mode checks the files system. Thorough mode checks the magnetic media on the disk and can take many hours depending on the size of your drive.

I'd run Standard mode first. If it runs fine, you could start Thorough mode, but if it has not found any problems in the first hour, then I would stop it and exit. If Thorough mode does find a lot of errors, then the disk is in bad shape and I would replace it.

Of course, your daughter does have a backup of all her important data.... right?
 
   / Laptop
  • Thread Starter
#9  
Our business has about 24 dells of which 5 are laptops. Never have we had a problem or yet to this date replaced one part. But I do think I got my first one as after I ran chkdisk and it fixed pages of errors, I ran it again yet to have it fix pages of errors. The second time through it only took 4 hours. Will call Dell and have it sent back it.

J
 
   / Laptop #10  
My daughter brings me her HP laptop every couple months to "tuneup" as hers slows down to almost a stop.

I'll run disk cleanup, SpyBot search & destroy,Adaware then scandisk and defrag. All of these programs finds and fixes all sorts of problems.
I'll also go to her startup program and remove all those various junk programs she downloads when she upgrades her "AIM" and/or loads other junk programs. I cannot seem to impress upon her to uncheck all those blammed boxes when shes loading programs!
She has XP and I've even had to use restore a few times.

Checkdisk can take quite awhile, especially with 30GB & larger HD's. Seems when I ran it I left it running overnight.

If it's still running for another 8 hrs or so, I'd stop it, go back and get all those junk programs out of startup and do a good backup. You can then run a thorough scandisk, it should run faster but will still take a few hrs based upon disk size.

My Dell Latitude laptop hasn't given me any problems at all. I use it for work & play.

Good luck
Volfandt
 
 
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