My notebook is flowing like Aunt Jemimah in Boston winter

[JTFazz]

My new notebook, a Dell Latitude 610, has started getting extraordinarily slow.

Yesterday, it took about 20 minutes to get through the bootup process. It is slow from the BIOS load which leads me to believe my memory or processor is just not performing like it should.

While in Windows, sometimes its okay, but sometimes it takes minutes to just load IE.

It has a 1.2ghz processor and 256 mb RAM...

Any ideas?

[Chairman_Kaga]

If it's slow before it even starts to hit the HD at startup, I'd check power supply/battery. Can do interesting things to when spinning up hardware if power is low.

Ever get a failure at boot up?

I'm not real versed in the laptop areas. But a lot of hardware issues travel platform to platform.

You could try running something like Sondra (or is it Sandra?) for benchmarking of individual parts (CPU, VGA, PCI, etc...) and then try to compare them to other like models' bench marks out there. See if you can determine a bottleneck.

[JTFazz]

This is while in the docking station... or out of the dock and AC powered. It is so weird.

I don't get any errors or crashes that would suggest the CPU is problematic... Its just really slow.

[YellowDog]

Here is the sandra utility. Good stuff

http://www.sisoftware.net/

YD

[JTFazz]

Thanks, Dan... You're my dog if you never win a race!!!

[CorporalHicks]

Go to Dell support and download the 32bit diagnostics for the C610. It's version A221. The floppy file name is CD122100.exe. The hard-drive install is CDD1221.exe.

The diagnostics will test every component.

We have MANY C610's here. I work on them all the time. The only time I see them getting "slow" like you describe is when the hard drive is starting to fail. Which happens with disturbing frequency......

That's true for us here as well. We use IBM laptops, but I had one suddenly start getting "slow" on me and I checked the SMART test output and the Win2K logs and I was getting lots of disk timeouts, etc. Disk stress test program showed propagating bad sectors on the drive - it was kaput. Time to Ghost that data while you still can and RMA the drive.

[Chalybos]

Go to Dell support and download the 32bit diagnostics for the C610. It's version A221. The floppy file name is CD122100.exe. The hard-drive install is CDD1221.exe.

The diagnostics will test every component.

We have MANY C610's here. I work on them all the time. The only time I see them getting "slow" like you describe is when the hard drive is starting to fail. Which happens with disturbing frequency......

That's true for us here as well. We use IBM laptops, but I had one suddenly start getting "slow" on me and I checked the SMART test output and the Win2K logs and I was getting lots of disk timeouts, etc. Disk stress test program showed propagating bad sectors on the drive - it was kaput. Time to Ghost that data while you still can and RMA the drive.
Yeah, you wouldn't believe the frequency with which LT HD's go belly up. When I worked at Dendrite, we serviced over 6,000 users. We'd average about 20 dead hard drives a week. Check the bios settings? Make sure it didn't do something assinine and screw with your settings?

[JTFazz]

I haven't used this laptop much because of holidays and such... just got around to running the Dell Hardware Diagnostics...

I got failures for three subcomponents of the hard disk:

Confidence Test:
Error 00F0: 1344 Uncorrectable Data Error or Media is Write-Protected

Read Test:
Error 00F0: 0244 Uncorrectable Data Error or Media is Write-Protected

Verify Test:
Error 00F0: 1A44 Uncorrectable Data Error or Media is Write-Protected

It seems to be running a bit faster today. Not sure why. All other system related issues passed tests. USB, Memory, Processors, Video, Audio, MoBo, System Management, PCI devices etc.

Didn't run stuff like keyboard, mouse, parallel ports, serial ports...

Not sure if that confirms suspicions or not... guess its time to take it to Tech Support.... :evil: :evil:

[Crazy Hobbit]

My new notebook, a Dell Latitude 610, has started getting extraordinarily slow.

Yesterday, it took about 20 minutes to get through the bootup process. It is slow from the BIOS load which leads me to believe my memory or processor is just not performing like it should.

While in Windows, sometimes its okay, but sometimes it takes minutes to just load IE.

It has a 1.2ghz processor and 256 mb RAM...

Any ideas?

My desktop was doing that just last night after my ISP dropped out. I did a reinstall of XP about 4 or 5 times because the computer would load into XP fine but it would take forever for me to get IE to do something after clicking on it or right clicking properties on My Computer to see hardware devices. Even installing drivers and software seemed to take longer then normal.

I noticed doing a control-alt-delete and seeing Users, my name wasn't under there until a good minute or two or three after loading into Windows and then things would seem to work. Now that I'm connected to the internet at my fiance's house, the problem has gone away. When I boot up here and click control-alt-delete my name is right away listed under Users.

It seemed to happen depending whether or not I was connected to the internet (DSL) or not. This is all from a clean install (3 or 4 times now with complete formats) and no special software installed. Just a clean XP install.

Very weird.

[ignus]

my laptop is a Pentium 75 with i think 40mb of RAM and a 40gb hdd i think (that was added last year by my friend), and it takes about 6 minutes to startup at least, but im sure thats due to the ancientness of the machine

[JTFazz]

A relatively new laptop should not act this way... about 95% of the time, it just slows to a crawl. In the docking station... out of the docking station... connected to the network... not connected to the network... very odd, unless the hard disk is truly trying to die.

I am going to Tech Support with it I guess... the errors that came up may not be dubious, but they certainly say something is rotten in Denmark... with apologies to anyone of Danish heritage... :lol:

[JTFazz]

Getting a new hard drive... mine is working okay for the last couple of days, but is likely to go south at any moment.

Thankfully, I have a 120 gig server account and moved all my files and docs to that. My Outlook PST file is stored there by default... so... just waiting on a new HD.

Thanks for all the help, especially Roland's experience. Tech support gave me no push-back when I told them it was about to die.