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General discussion

Laptop showing lag, Tried several things

Feb 17, 2004 11:03AM PST

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I've noticed over the past few weeks that my computer has been abnormally sluggish especially regarding hard drive read/write times. When I load a program, lets say Word2003, it just seems like it hesitates (hard drive makes normal hdd reading noises) and then finally the program launches and works fine. So basically there is abnormal lag time in launching programs etc.. I've compared my laptop with my friends who has a similar speed Celeron with 512 and it seems like his blows mine away!

I am running WindowsXP Professional on an HPze4325 NOTEBOOK.
It is an AMD2000+ (runs at 1.67GHz)
512megs of ddr Ram
40Gig Hard drive (23 gigs of free space still)
64 Meg ATI video card

I have done all the regular maintenance checks...
Spyware programs are run regularly
Anti-virus checked
Defragged (several times)
Check system processes running (nothing big or unusual)
Cleared the startup folder
Ran MSCONFIG, cleared startup programs from taskbar.
Virtual Ram is system managed (i think its at 644 usually).
Ran Burnin tests, said everything was fine but the hard drive was kinda slow? Not sure what they compare it to, ofcourse its slow compared to a desktop hdd.
Ran Memtest86, no errors found.
Last night I ran scandisk for the first time in a LONG time.
It breezed through everything UNTIL it got to step (4 out of 5) which is the File Checking System? That process took FOREVER. I mean I started it at 1:50am and it was on about 25% around 2:15am and I fell asleep. When I woke up the computer was on the windows logon screen so I assume everything is ok!?! How do I know if there were errors?

Are there any other tests or benchmarks that you could recommend so I can figure out where my problem lies? Anything I should checkout or test?

One last thing... I have 2 slots for ram, each is filled with 256 chips to = 512.
I have a best buy gift card for $150.00 and I was thinking about going out and getting two 512 chips to = 1024 of ram. You think that would make a drastic difference? I don't really do anything intense, just web browsing and word processing. I occasionally draw maps in Illustrator 10 but other then that, I do nothing intense. I have maybe but one game on the computer and it doesn't use graphics.

Thanks,
Mike

Discussion is locked

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Did you do this procedure?
Feb 17, 2004 11:15AM PST

1. http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/tech/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx

I'm unsure why people have an issue with this procedure. In no uncertain words, if you write back you "looked" and didn't perform the procedure, then we are done and I wish you the best of luck. Sorry if that seems harsh, but I am trying to save us the usual 4 exchanges...

2. Pests and Parasites.

It's my choice to allow no pests found with the 5 tools I note at http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-6132-0.html?forumID=32&threadID=1313&start=0

If you allow such pests on your machine which are NOT detected with your Antivirus because they are not Virus/Trojan, then that's your choice and I hope you share that you kept the pests.

Hope you fix it,

Bob

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Re:Laptop showing lag, Tried several things
Feb 17, 2004 9:49PM PST

First question: How many applications are running in systray? Second Question: How much space do you have left on your hard drive? Question 3: Have you ever cleaned the temp, and temp internet folders? Question 4: How often do you perform file maintenance (scandisk, defrag)? XP's scandisk is located in my computer, right click the local hard drive, left click peoperties, and it is the very first box under the tools tab! Yes scandisk is called error check. If you do not perform any of these maintenance procedure, how is it so many end users think you just use, and use and use a system and nothing will affect it's performance without clean up and file maintenance? The more browsers you have, each has their individual caches you must clean out as well, I have 3 multibooted operating systems (98SE, W2K Pro, and XP Pro) on my system, and have the additional caches of Mozilla, and Opera caches to clean out, for the browsers using those caches are (Netscape 7.1, Mozilla 1.6, and Opera 7.23). I maintain my file system in all three of them. To further reference this issue, in most workplaces, they have individuals come in after their work establishment is closed for the work day, and clean up their file systems, correct bad code errors, and back up server information. At Home it is the END USERS responsibility to do this!

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Re:Laptop showing lag, Tried several things
Feb 17, 2004 9:52PM PST

If you also have 512 RAM, XP will usually set up the virtual memory paging file size to 1 1/2 to 3 times physical memory, it should read 768 to 1536.