6 replies to this topic

[Crawlerz246]

my granny (and let's face it, she's computer illiterate of course) has an aging DELL lappy. I think it's vostro something or other. mainly uses it to watch streaming movies and programs and email her friend and leaf thru photos. I must say it wasn't peak when I bought it several years ago (5-6-7? I forget) and now it's just giving me trouble. it's got some sort of AMD CPU, 1.6GB RAM I believe, winXP, and a built in video card, of course. one of the things that chaffes my butt is that it takes like 15-20 min to fully load to the finish. (yes I checked for infections many times, yes I took out everything from startup). but it's still death. I must say she clicks on just about everything online while watching these hideous programs, so adware things are a constant presence, which I try to clean up as best I can with things like malwarebytes or something.

lately it's been even slower and even giving a few disk check errors. so of course I let it scan disk itself. seems to be starting up now, but slow as ever. now sometimes when watching things on it, the sounds begins skipping (like an old record) for about 10sec. like instead of saying black it goes "b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-black."

not really sure what to do here. hoping the community might have a clue. ~thanks guys.

Edited by Crawlerz246, 29 March 2012 - 09:28 AM.

[dr_bowtie]

back up her important info and reload the thing fresh from the recovery partition.... take that out of the equation before you go any further

[Crawlerz246]

back up her important info and reload the thing fresh from the recovery partition.... take that out of the equation before you go any further

not sure I have a recovery partition. I remember I manually reinstalled xp last time. was a pain.

[Phil]

I'd also check hardware. At least run Memtest and something like HDTune to check SMART data.

[Coors]

Probably just needs a fresh install. If the hdd is still good do a reinstall and then set it up so it's harder for her to infect it with like MSE, adblock, etc

[Waco]

Toss an old copy of Vista or a copy of 7 on it if it has 2 GB of RAM or more. I've run both on OLD hardware before and they perform relatively well as long as you have more than 1 GB of RAM.

Though, to be honest, it sounds like the HDD may be going. Skipping sound is almost always related to an I/O error of some sort though it can occasionally happen with extreme CPU load.

[Crawlerz246]

Toss an old copy of Vista or a copy of 7 on it if it has 2 GB of RAM or more. I've run both on OLD hardware before and they perform relatively well as long as you have more than 1 GB of RAM.

Though, to be honest, it sounds like the HDD may be going. Skipping sound is almost always related to an I/O error of some sort though it can occasionally happen with extreme CPU load.

it's got only 1.6GB ram I believe if you can trust my computer. and yes unfortunately I'm starting to come to the same conclusion that the HDD is going bye bye