Vista running really slow

[bizt]

Hi,

I have spent a couple days now trying to fix my Vista as it is running very slow. It seems to start up OK then after a few minutes it starts to hang for periods then coming back, after a short while it just gets totally un-usable and un-responsive as the hanging gets worse then it just hangs period. The cursor moves around but when I try to switch windows, close applications down, even shut Windows down .. it just does nothing. Task Manager reports that nothing is really using up any memory, processor so its not like I have some CPU intensive app running hogging all the resourses. This is happening every time I start up. Btw Im currently logged into safe mode so its running fine however not in normal mode

In the past couple of days Ive backed up everything and restored my laptop back to its origanal factory settings, from past issues Ive become a little fed up with trying to figure out what the problem is that I just now resort to backing up all my files, re-installing Vista, get updates from MS and then re-install my applications. This time however I get as far as re-installing Vista and then when I try to gets Windows up to date or re-install my apps its starts to run really slow. Ive now re-installed Vista about 3 times trying to determine exactly when it falls over but it doesnt matter what I do or dont (start installing apps, update windows, uninstall apps) it still starts to run slow. Im not ruling out that any of these may be the case its just not very consistant to any particular update.

I did (and still do) suspect that it may be a bad sector on the disk as Ive read this could slow things done if windows is trying to read/write to the hard disk. This is when I try to run CHKDSK (where I have to restart windows and run CHKDSK on startup) it gets so far, detects a few bad files but then seems to stall .. I even left this over night and it just wont finish or if it does its gonna take days to finish but Ive not tried that. Could it be the result of a bad sector? What should I do if this is the case? Replace the HD?

Ideally I would like to get the fresh install of Vista up to date as my laptop is a year old so when I re-install everything its a year out of date, suspect also it may be some issue with an early version of Vista. When I run the update program though it manages the first one then restarts as it requests, when I try to run the next which takes a bit longer (260MB or something) it gets at best about 60% downloaded but then the laptop start its slow down then it just kinda hangs and I dont know whats happening but even after an hour its just the same and I have to kill the laptop without properly shutting down. Also it seems that when after I start using the internet it be that Windows Update, browsing (IE), updating Norton thats part of the Vista install etc that problems occur. Could it be that something is attacking my line? Im behind a router and Windows firewall. Ive run an uptodate virus check but nothing detected

Anyway if you have made it this far down the post then thank you and hopefully you can help me. Btw my Vista install is one of they no-CD's and has its own partition on the HDD so I cannot run Windows repair if that would help

Cheers
Bizt

[dneilson]

If you suspect the hard drive you might want to run diagnostics on it.

Hard drive diagnostics

Fujitsu Utilities
http://www.fcpa.com/support/hard-dri...utilities.html

IBM Drive Fitness Test
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Hitachi Drive Fitness Test
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Maxtor Maxblast 3
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/ma...&downloadID=57

Maxtor PowerMax
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/ma...&downloadID=22

Seagate Seatools
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

Western Digital Software & Drivers
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n

Samsung
http://www.samsung.com/global/busine...ort_HUTIL.html

[Broni]

What are the computer specs? Same as listed in your sig for XP?

[bizt]

Specs are:

HP TX1000 laptop
AMD Turion 64 chip (1.5GHz I think?)
2GB DDR memory
120GB HDD (Vista runs on a 72GB partition)

Not sure much else, its built enough to handle Vista. Has done in the past well enough. The laptop was shipped with Vista.

Thanks for the list of links. Im not sure what my hard drive manufacturer is, where would I find this? Do I need to contact HP? Im sure Ive done this before and I think its Seagate. Ive installed SeaTools already and it didnt detect any hardware to diagnose.

Ive just learned that there is a startup repair with my Vista so gonna give that a go. Might try and re-install Vista too as Im sure it does run fine, gonna try and not connect to the internet for a short bit and see what point it starts to falter

Anyway thanks for the help and Ill post back and let yous know what I find

Bizt

[Broni]

Run Everest. It may tell you what HD you have.

Also...
Download HijackThis:
http://www.trendsecure.com/portal/en...kthis/download
by clicking on Download HijackThis Installer
Install, and run it.
Post HijackTHis log.