Rehabilitating my laptop

[doubleohfive]

I've had it for almost two years. About this time last year, I had to pretty much wipe the drive and reinstall Vista (because that's what it came with ) to get it up and running again. Ever since it's been slow, sluggish, prone to freezing, and wholly irritating.

The fan turns on at random intervals and hisses for random amounts of time, sometimes louder than the volume on the laptop itself can go. The battery sometimes becomes alarmingly warm if left on for too long.

Most irritatingly, I click something and it takes FOREVER to open a link, or new window, etc.

The cursor sometimes moves around without my prompting it to, and if I'm typing it will reset where I'm typing and require me to cut and paste or start over.

I've run AVG antivirus software on it; AVG says the machine is clean. I'm running Ad-Aware SE on it right now to find out if there's any malware on it, but it's been going (full system scan) for three and a half hours and is STILL going.

Mostly I'm concerned that of the 120 or so GB of memory I have on the thing, 103 seems to be taken up and only 5 are "free."

So, I put it to you all: WTF is going on here? What can I do to speed up this machine's performance, repair whatever issues there are, and get myself back to being mobile again??

As ever, thank you in advance for taking the time to read this and for whatever help or suggestions you have to offer.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

It sounds like the fan in the laptop is clogged and/or failing. This is allowing heat to build up inside the case. CPU speed will be reduced to stop the heat buildup, which results in overall slowness.

What kind of pointing device do you have? Is it a touchpad built into the laptop? If so, its odd behavior is probably the result of overheating, too.

Has the battery become at all misshapen? An overheated battery may rupture internally and warp, even if subtly.

By "120GB of memory" I assume you mean hard drive space. 3GB is enough to get by as long as you don't install anything else. Go through your programs and see what you can get rid of. Run the Disk Cleanup wizard, too.

It really sounds like you're having hardware problems here. The fan behavior, slowness, and pointer issues indicate an overall hardware fault. Take it to a shop or something. If it's already seriously damaged--which is possible if you've been running it hot for a while--it may be cheaper just to replace it, especially since it's two years old.

 

[Small White Car]

You need to get a bunch of files off of there onto an external drive.

When it's that full the system doesn't have much room for memory swapping so it's constantly have to re-write stuff which is death to computer-speed.

Clear up about 20 GB and I bet you'll see a difference.

Also, go to crucial.com and check out your system. Can it take more RAM than you have? Is it affordable?

Upgrading your RAM and cleaning up some drive space are the 2 best things you can do.

 

[sojourner]

^What he said! Plus, spend the money to buy an upgrade copy of Windows 7. Vista is a pig that needs to be slaughtered. 7 runs much better.

 

[Small White Car]

And, of course, the ultimate goal is to replace your laptop's hard drive with one of these babies.

But they're still $700 so I'm actually not suggesting that just yet.

But I've got my eye on them...just waiting for the price to come down a little bit more...

 

[Candlelight]

Clear your caches, remove temporary internet files, delete Vista, copy-

Ha, ya got me.

If you can get to someone with an air compressor, blow all the crap out of fan. If it's been two years without a proper clean there's probably a shite load of dust and gunk built up in there.

 

[Pingfah]

It sounds like the fan in the laptop is clogged and/or failing. This is allowing heat to build up inside the case. CPU speed will be reduced to stop the heat buildup, which results in overall slowness.

I had this exact problem recently. Compressed air didn't clear it so I had to open it up.

In order to get to the fan I had to take all the screws out of the back, fair enough you might think. But then I also had to remove the front panel and remove the whole keyboard just to get to one screw mounted beneath the keyboard that holds the back panel on from the other side. I basically had to dismantle the entire machine to get to the fan.

Fucking Toshiba.