Notebooks Help me not look like a geek failure in front of the G.F

[Parge]

Hi guys, need a bit of technical advice.

Girlfriend was complaining her laptop was slow. Its a new HP Probook 4530s, shes only had it about 2 months.

Anyway, I took a look and she was right, really slow! Jerky mouse, things taking ages to open, task bar unresponsive - basically unusable. I immediately thought 'virus'. Instead of arsing around trying to track it down and remove it, I went for the nuke option - a format using HPs backup partition. The reformat completed, but on trying to boot into windows I got an error messaging saying tcpip.dll was missing. Tried to use the reformat option again, but couldn't get past this error message.

So, I though, uber nuke it, and formatted the entire hard disk and reinstalled windows using a spare W7 disk I had lying about. Fine. Boots into windows. However, things are still very slow, and the mouse visibly lags. Thought the problem might be drivers, so installed the Intel IGP drivers, and the Synaptics touchpad drivers. No difference. Tried my own Sidewinder X5 mouse - exactly the same - really laggy, by which I mean, the cursor doesn't move, then flies across the screen.

Looking at diagnostics, the CPU isn't under any huge load. However the HD makes a faint, repeating clicking sound, and I'm beginning to wonder if it maybe faulty and causing the problems.

Any ideas?

[longweight]

It really does sound like a bad HDD, can you run anything like crystal disk?

[bulldogjeff]

The hard drive shouldn't really affect mouse movements, slow opening of progs and read write errors would be more likely. You could run the windows disc checker to see what it comes back with. That said if you've got a spare HD laying about, it wouldn't do any harm to put it in and do an install just to see what happens. At least you can rule out one problem that way.

[dancingbear84]

Run a HDD Diag program from the ultimate boot cd, HDD manufacturers site or dos chkdsk /f will do the same I think. You can even get Win to do a check disk. right click HDD properties, tools, error checking, then tick both options. Do you have the latest chipset drivers from Intel too? maybe worth a punt

EDIT is anything showing flagged in device manager, or in the Windows logs?

[Buzzons]

Could try to use hddtune to see if it dies trying to do basic benchmarks on the disk?
Could try booting to a linux livecd (like backtrack) to see if it's laggy in that?
Could use the Win7 resource monitor to see if you're getting bad disk io (can get to it from task manager under the performance tab)

[noizdaemon666]

I just had the same issue with a customer laptop. Turns out the hard drive was buggered or very nearly buggered. I'd run Seatools for DOS on it and see what it turns up

[kenco_uk]

I think you've pinpointed the problem already, it does sound like the hdd's on its way out. You can either see if the hdd can be replaced by the hdd manufacturer or get HP to send a replacement under warranty.


If all else fails, get another girlfriend

[saspro]

Go in to the BIOS.

There's a HDD & system hardware tester built in.

[Parge]

Thank you very much for all your responses! I'll try the above tonight!

[short1uk]

Download Acronis Drive monitor - tis free! Install it - will tell you if its dead or not and what's wrong with it. I have it on this machine and just put it on a customers machines what was similiar to yours. That one was 48% healthy and dropping ie bad disk.

http://www.acronis.co.uk/homecomputi...drive-monitor/

[thehippoz]

if you were taking care of things in the bedroom.. she wouldn't care

[Parge]

Guys, just to feedback on this.

Yep, as suspected it was the hard drive. Acronis disk manager reported disk health at 16%, SMART failure, bad blocks on the drive, etc etc.

Thank you all for your help!