Laptop problem - diagnosis please?

A friend is staying with us for a while, and has just found her laptop
seems dead, so I said I'd take a look. It's a Dell Latitude something
-or another running XP.

Symptoms:

On her normal startup, gets as far as windows Background, then seems
to hang, no explorer menu bar, icons, nowt. Some disk usage but not
much, CTRL-ALT-DEL does nothing.

Starting in safe mode, I can get a few things going, but the CPU is
permanantly at 100% usage, mostly on the 'System' task (i.e. not
System Idle process). Anything I try takes an age, although tasks will
attempt to start.

So in essence it seems that it's possibly just running at 1/1000 of
normal speed, or something.

Oh, and I went through the full diagnostics from startup and
everything was a 'pass' although the battery health is saying it needs
replacing. I'm assuming that's not related, as I'm running with
external power attatched.

Gotta go out skiing now, so won't catch up till later, but any
suggestions would be welcome. Ta.

 

Update before I leave the door: left long enough, like 10-15 mins,
explorer seems to be finaly getting its act together - icons and start
bar are populated/ing, but just very, very, very slowly. Not completed
yet, but doesn't seem to respond to keyboard, although mouse movement
is working.

 

FWIW, probably nowt, Pat's laptop took to stopping at "just the
Background" stage, but would continue booting if you hit the spacebar.

 

Wife's Toshiba did similar, turned out to be a burnt out fan and
blocked cooling ducting, so the thing just kept getting hot. Easily
traced as she said it had been getting red-hot on her lap for ages!
She never thought to tell me until it went west ... Bought a new
duct/fan/heatsink assembly from ebay, replaced it all and job's a good
'un.

I'd have a look, therefore, at the cooling slots underneath/to the
sides and see if there is any fluff hanging out of them. Clean as best
you can with a paintbrush/canned air and see if it helps.

 

Rip it out and start again.
She's let some rogue prog/virus into it. If you can be arsed, you can
shut down background progs one by one until the CPU frees up, but life's
too short for that, at the speed it's running.
If the owner hasn't backed up her data, do it now by removing the HD and
slaving it to another machine, then re-install Windows.

 

Ace escribió:

I just gave my ski boots away. These knees will never ski again.

 

Be bloody carefull with the canned air, it is capable of repeating
my mistrake. The compressor and airgun were nearby so I thought
a quick blow job (fnarr) should remove the accumulation of
dustbunnies from my old Inspiron. BAD MOVE. The airblast made
the fan spin up to eeeek RPM and any motor is also a generator.
Motherboards do not expect the sudden arrival of lots of voles
from that direction.

ALWAYS immobilise any fans before blowing. Toothpicks or cotton
buds poked through the blades is a good suggestion.

 

Heh, didn't think of that .. I've been blasting away merrily ..

Fair points, thanks.

 

Separate h/w and s/w problems. Boot it up with a live CD of an
appropriate linux distribution, ooh! say one named after a common garden
herb, perhaps.

If it runs ok in that then Windows is fsked (surprise, surprise). If not
then it's hardware.

 

Or mice, rats or any other kind of small mammal

 

Likely

Or disk failure of sectors where her profile is stored. Seen that before
as well.

Sort of depends on the disk activity light IME


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Snip.

We've an old Dell Latitude D505. In the last few months we've had the
same symptoms so I've reinstalled the OS (XP pro) with no luck.

THEN, there was a noise. A high speed squealing... yes the HDD was
buggered. Easy as chips to change out, the worst bit was doing the
hours of updates to get the OS 'safe'.

A 160 gb drive can be had for 38ukp delivered to the door via
Novatech, but I scrounged an old 30 gig for nowt.

It's now as nippy as it ever was, and that's with just 512Mb ram.

HTH.

 

Well, if you choose to use an eight-year old OS...

 

It's licenced for the machine and all it's used for is spider
solitaire and surfing. It sits on the sofa all day.

 

So there couldn't be a better, more stable and free alternative.
Obviously.

 

Your motherboard was an 'amster, and your father smelled of
elderberries..