T43 running slower and slower everyday....

[elazarus]

Hello,

I have a 2 year old IBM T43 Thinkpad which is getting slower everyday. Slow to start up and even slower (3-4 minutes) to shut down.

The computer is "clean" having run Defrag, CCleaner, Registry Repair Pro, deleted all Temp files etc.

Did a System restore back to the earliest date XP would let me.

Is there something I can do? I can't believe that the 1.86 Centrino M processor is getting tired and old? The computer has 1.5gigs of Ram.

I didn't think it was old enough to run this poorly....

Any thoughts.

Thank you

Elliot

[coreman]

I have T41 and found shutting down got very slow after I installed Desktop Search from Microsoft. For whatever reason it began hogging all of my resources and slowing down shutdown.

I removed it and went with Copernic Search and have been very happy with results. Those Desktop Search/Indexing programs can hog a lot of CPU cycles without you knowing it.

Even if this isn't your specific problem, it sounds to me like you have a program(s) that is the problem...it isn't the laptop.

[Temetka]

Run scandisk to check for bad sectors. You did not mention if it was the the original hard drive in the machine or not.

[jdhurst]

Two things (amongst many possibilities):
1. Is your disk running in PIO mode (check the IDE controller properties in Device Manager)?
2. How much IE Cache do you have? More than 100Mb is a fairly sure route to slowness.

... JDH

[GACrabill]

The computer is "clean" having run Defrag, CCleaner, Registry Repair Pro, deleted all Temp files etc.

You didn't mention these but I always start with the following free products when fixing someone else's PC :
- SpywareBlaster
- Spybot Search & Destroy
- Ad-Aware
- AVG Anti-Spyware
- Super Anti-Spyware
and of course an anti-virus scan.

[elazarus]

Thank you for responding.

The disk is running in Ultra DMA mode 5. The cache is set at 50mb...and it has been manually cleared.

I ran Scandisk.exe and there were 0 bad sectors so the Hard drive is not going...yet. Scandsk did clear up a lot of entries.....

I have run in the past 6 hours...

Ad-Aware
Avast
TUT The Ultimate.....

Everything is clean, defragged, lubed, oiled and filter.....not much change at all.

Any more thoughts?

Thank you

Elliot

[vlyne]

I would check the Windows Task Manager (Ctl-Alt-Del then "t") and see whether anything is hogging the CPU (double click on CPU column to sort tasks by CPU usage). Likewise, check memory usage. Also check the Performance screens to see usage of CPU/memory.
Cheers

[GnatGoSplat]

You might have some spyware that commercial programs just can't catch. It seems in the rare instance that I get a spyware, Ad-Aware, Spybot, and Spy Sweeper just can't find it... or if they do find it and "quarantine" it, some traces of it still remain. For that reason, when I suspect spyware, I always do CTRL-SHIFT-ESC and manually search for suspicious processes and look them up with Google.

Failing that, a clean install always works!