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Harddrive or RAM failure?


Mitsus

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My old laptop, that has just been sitting in the dust for a couple of years, is booting very slowly now. I'm not sure what it is, whether it's the RAM or Harddrive. It's an IBM Thinkpad R32, Pentium 4, 256 MB RAM and a 40 GB HDD. It takes about 10-20 minutes to boot into the login screen, then about 10 to go into an account. I believe it is the HDD because once things have loaded, as in once you open control panel it goes painfully slow, and then you can do whatever with it. Close it, reopen it, goes lightning fast. Games load incredibly slow but play fast, which makes me think the RAM is alright. PE loads slow, takes 2-5 minutes to boot a 150 MB ISO. Please help me find out which one of these is failing!

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Download the Ultimate Boot CD v4.0, burn it to a CD, boot to it on your laptop and test both your RAM with MemTest and your HDD with the appropriate tool.

If everything checks out and it's not a hardware problem, follow these steps:

If you have Norton installed, please use this tool to remove it.

Use CCleaner to clean out the temp/cache on your PC. If you're not one to clean things out on a regular basis, you'll likely clear out anywhere from 300 MB to 5 GBs of files.

Use jv16 PowerTools 2006's Registry Cleaner on Aggressive Mode to scan, fix and remove invalid registry entries. Be sure to make a backup of the removed entries when it provides you with that option prior to removal, incase something is corrupted. This is unlikely to happen as this registry cleaner is significantly more intelligent than most other typical cleaners.

Afterwards, use the Registry Compactor feature to defragment your registry. Many people don't believe this affects performance at all. I have experienced differently. It will not hurt anything and it's a good experience to try it and see for yourself.

Use JKDefrag v3.7 or a trial version of Ultimate Defrag, Diskeeper or PerfectDisk to defragment your HDD(s). Make sure to perform a Boot-Time defrag as well.

Spyware:

Download, install and update both Ad-Aware SE Personal v1.06R1 (or Ad-Aware 2007 Beta 4) and Spybot S&D v1.4. Do full system scans with both and clean/fix any infections they report.

Viruses:

Download, install and update Kaspersky Anti-Virus v6.0.2.621. Do a full system scan and let it clean anything it reports. Reboot if an infection cannot be initially cleaned/deleted.

Kaspersky's trial lasts 30 days. If you wish to use this product for one year legally, use the AOL version labeled ActiveVirusShield.

If you prefer freeware then use Avast! Home Edition v4.7 or AntiVir v7.00.03.02. The latter has an even higher detection rate than Kaspersky and NOD32. For more information about anti-virus products, please visit http://www.av-comparatives.org.

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