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General discussion

Laptop suddenly became v. slow; after reformat, it's still v

Aug 29, 2010 8:42PM PDT

We purchased the laptop about 2 months ago; it was all good and well, games would run smoothly, applications would load quickly, boot time was next to instant, and so on.
Despite this, the laptop has suddenly gone all slow and sluggish; it wasn't even progressive: we turned it off one night and the day after when we booted it back up, it took forever to load. Also, we had this black screen with just the mouse cursor, and the screen would stay like this for a good 5 - 10 minutes before the login screen would appear, and such would be the case, again, after we logged in. We didn't do anything to the laptop either prior to its slowing down.
We got a bit fed up so we decided to reformat, yet the laptop is still sluggish and slow?! We're seriously out of ideas: we've virus, malware and spyware scanned, we've also defragmented the hard drive and have ran chkdisk scans (which all took forever), all of which have come up with nothing. Any ideas, please? :/

Specs if they're of any use:

Windows 7 64-bit
Intel Pent T4400
ATI Mobility HD 4570
4 GB Memory

Discussion is locked

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Did you
Aug 29, 2010 10:50PM PDT

Did you make sure to install all the drivers for the hardware? Many people are under the mistaken impression that these are built into Windows. They're not, they have to be installed separately.

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Thank you!
Aug 30, 2010 1:39AM PDT

Thanks for the replies guys; I managed to fix it!
I forgot I had split the HDD into two partitions, one for windows and programs and the other for documents. For some reason, the one partition was NTFS (windows) and the other (documents) was labelled as 'RAW' so I converted that to NTFS, and the laptop is now back to normal. I'm still confused but I guess I won't be doing that again Silly

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Some folks
Aug 30, 2010 12:20AM PDT

Will run chkdsk and because it finishes they think that's good....everything is OK.

They never look at the output......the log.

If that log was showing bad sectors and a two month old machine.....I'd be hot after the maker.