[frontball13]

I just formatted my HP Laptop a couple months back due to increasing errors and system flaws. Having all of the disks required to get my programs up and running again, I went through with this and 5 hours later had my laptop back. However, while transferring a few large files (exceeding 2 GB) to the laptop from my desktop for DVD backups, I began to notice a difference in the laptop's performance.

It has begun to slow down incredibly. The hard-drive seems to work really hard for small tasks and opening and closing programs can take up to and including a full 5 minutes (programs like Windows Media Player, Winamp, and most web browsers).

I've done defrags, disk scans, virus scans, registry scans, spyware removals, all of which have not helped the situation at all.

System Specs:
1.4 GHz
512 MB RAM (though is registering as 480 MB right now)
55.6 GB Hard Drive (26 GB free space)
Windows XP Service Pack 2 (this may be significant, as it never ran on SP2 before)

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Have you run full diagnostics on the hard drive? Not just the Windows disk scan but the drive maker's or HP diagnostic check. Also what does your Task Manager say whiile all this is going on/ And you event logs?

[Tyger]

Have you run full diagnostics on the hard drive? Not just the Windows disk scan but the drive maker's or HP diagnostic check. Also what does your Task Manager say whiile all this is going on/ And you event logs?

[frontball13]

Well, as for the task manager, the processor usage seems to fluctuate quite a bit between high and low, as if it has to wait for the hard drive to catch up. And I'm not sure where to look for event logs.

As for diagnostics... my hard drive seems to be a generic brand and HP doesn't seem to want to give me a simple diagnostic tool...

[Tyger]

Download, install and run this program, Belarc Advisor

http://www.belarc.co...e_download.html

and among other things it will tell you what your hard drive is. You can then go to the drive makers website and make a bootable diagnostic floppy and run it. Whatever you do don't choose the option to write the drive to zeros.

[frontball13]

Big problem there. I found a tool, but I have no floppy disk drive.

[Tyger]

Do they have a version for a CD and can you burn it to a CD? That seems to almost be a required option these days.

[frontball13]

Sorry, took me a while to find the time to do the scan.

Anyhow, I did it. It found corrupted sectors, fixed em, and the problem is still the same.

Any other ideas?