A mate of mine has purchased a Core Duo laptop three weeks ago, kinda high-spec. Last weekend though, his dad fiddled with it to get the printer to install. Since about then (he's not really sure) his laptop has been acting really, really, really damn slow. When I took a look at it I couldn't believe how slow it was. Starting Windows XP took literally 5 minutes, and once in there, everything is very slow. Opening a window even slows down the music (winamp), something I've never experienced (the music really just "slows down", a bit like if you would turn the RPM of a record down). He's got the latest norton antivirus and scanned his laptop thoroughly but everything was ok. I checked his settings, no broken drivers or anything that I could see. I'm thinking it's a hardware problem, but just can't think of anything that would be broke to cause "slowness" as opposed to complete "deadness". His laptop didn't fell hot like I suppose it would feel if the cooling was broken, which would explain the slowness (because of the skipping of cycles of the processor as protection). Anyone has an idea what to look for? I'm really out.
If it's a Centrino setup, it might be worth checking the network drivers: Some of the recent Intel drivers had some security and memory leak problems, which may cause such a slowdown.. - Guess checking the RAM usage would be the easiest way to check this...
