I have a strange problem that I've just encountered today with my PC. I was using my computer and I decided to restart for some reason that I can't remember anymore. I pushed the power button on the computer to shut down. I was running ITunes at the moment listening to some music. Normally my computer shuts down in under 2 minutes, but this time it took about 10 minutes, and my music started skipping like crazy (off the HD, not a CD), which is understandable because the system was using most of the resources to shut it self down.
Now here's the problem. When I started it back up again, it took about 15-20 minutes to finally start! It sat at the Windows loading page for about 10 minutes or so (before it even got to the user login page). And when I logged in, it took about 5x longer to start than normal. When it finally loaded up, I decided to listen to more music, and when I opened ITunes and hit play, the music skips like crazy. It takes maybe 3 or 4 seconds to play 1 second of a song. On a side note, it also does this with the "Windows chime" when I logged in and with any other sound that comes out of the computer. I thought maybe Itunes got corrupted somehow so I uninstalled/reinstalled it, but to no avail. It doesn't seem like an Itunes problem because the same thing happens with Media Player. The computer seems to run fine as long as I don't try to play any media files. The minute a sound/video tries to get played, my computer becomes all choppy and the mouse moves slow and programs won't switch, etc. etc. etc. It still takes an unusually long time to start. Normal start time for my computer used to be 2-3 minutes tops, now its about 10-15. System Idle Process in the Task Manager is 90+ percent, which I'm told tells you how much of the CPU isn't being used at the moment, but I could be wrong about that. I've already tried reinstalling my sound card drivers, but that didn't work. I went to PCPitStop and ran a full test and it said that my Hard Drive wasn't running at a normal rate (it said something like 1megabyte per something, I don't remember what exactly). People have suggested the obvious Defrag/Scandisk solution, but I think it would have been a gradual change and not an instantaneous one if that were the case. System specs are below. Anybody know what might have happened and a possible solution?
Thanks
Specs:
HP Pavillion dv5115nr Laptop
Windows XP SP2 w/Media Center
1.8 GHz AMD 64 processor
1.256 Gigs of PC2700 DDR2 RAM
128 MB Radion 200M video card
I can provide additional information if needed.