My wife has an IBM Thinkpad X31 that is a couple of years old. Recently, the computer is super slow. I only have Firefox of Excel running, and it takes forever to scroll down a page or change cells. The Sytem Monitor shows the CPU being fully used, then down to 5% all the time. I have McAfee virusscan and personal firewall on the computer. I have run Adaware/Spybot/McAfee on it. I have used a registry cleaner and a CC cleaner. All my internet folders are empty. There is no virus or spyware on the pc. I even ran another program to make sure there weren't any spyware programs secretly running. Nada. The computer has a 40g hard drive, with 17gb leftover. It has a 1.4GHz Intel Pentium M. It has 512 MB of memory as well. What should I do? Is there somewhere that I can take the computer that is reliable and reputable (IE won't just check for spyware like I did and clean out the registries then charge me)? What can I do to the PC to stop it from slowing down all the time? This never used to happen and there are never more than a couple of programs running (like IE or Firefox and a MS Office application) Thanks in advance...
Well if you haven't even refreshed your system for a couple of years I'd say go ahead and do it. There are probably tons of things you can do to solve your issue but anytime someone hasn't refreshed their system in years I'd recommend it. Other than that things that could be causing the issue. Corrupted video driver when you're scrolling. 3rd party utility in the background. Badly fragmented hard drive. hard to determine w/o looking at the system though. Anymore details? give us a list of what is running in your processes?
I took screen snapshots of the programs running and the CPU usage graph. It's at home. I'll link to them later Is there anywhere I can take it and have a pro mess with it? Or is it fixable? If I refresh my system, do I lose all the saved files on there (impt stuff)
That one shot of mcafee taking up 74% but yet cpu usage says 5% is odd. I'd try and reinstall mcafee first off.
I would go ahead and do a clean install if you haven't done it since you purchased the laptop. Burn all of your files to a DVD or save them to an external HDD and wipe everything clean. It is a pain in the butt for a week or so while you re-install all the drivers and programs, but your machine will run so much faster and everything will be working fine.
I do not recommend a "clean install." Here's where I think you can see some good results: McAfee virus scan. McAfee won't really let you easily, but try to stop all McAfee services EXCEPT your firewall within the "Services" administrator applet. Make them start MANUALLY. Restart your machine. Capture or record your memory and PC response stats then. Be on the internet for a few minutes only. Report your stuff. Go back and start them manually and see the response again. O&BTW, to capture the CURRENT screen, use ALT+PrtScrn instead of just PrtScrn.
Whoa, tiger. WHOA. It might require more memory, but it's not bad, man... it does what it's supposed to, but I think the developers all had 3GB memory PCs when they made it. All I said was that this is what might be causing some memory hogging.
McAfee and Norton do the job, but both are horribly bloated and very uncooperative with other software. there are better antivirus alternatives.
Okay. For simplicity's sake (I appreciate all the feedback but it sounds really complicated), if I uninstall McAfee VirusScan and Firewall, what is a good free alternative firewall and anti-virus? And if I do this, will this potentially help the computer act normally and protect it properly?
thanks. so if I open the mcafee center, I should turn off everthing except the firewall? Will this keep my computer protected properly?
OK, I really didn't see the need to start a new "Laptop Problem" thread, so I figured I'd put my problem in here: I've been having problems a LOT with my laptop recently, so I finally went and got a new hard-drive. Thing has worked less than a month. Now when I start it up, It shows the Blue screen of death during boot up and states "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME." I've tried everything it suggested to try, other than getting a new hard drive. It was running just fine until this weekend. What it did do a few times the day before it crashed was give me a "massive error" message, which lead me to a "pay" website. I basically thought it was spam and blew it off. Then the thing just shut down and hasn't rebooted since. Is there any way to repair this? Could I have possibly have bought a corrupted hard drive in the first place? I'm at my wits end with this computer. It has already lost me a ton of work info.
Well you could try a repair install of windows and see if that does anything. Or better yet, use the windows recovery/repair console and see if you can even see files on your harddrive. That will probably be a good indicator if your harddrive is functioning. To do the first option, you would boot windows off of the cd and run the install normally. Eventually when you have the option to erase your partition, it should also give you an option to repair it. And as for the second option, when you boot of the cd, on the first screen it should give you an option to launch the repair console. That tool should allow you to view the file content on your harddrive.
there are outpost free, zonealarm free and of course comodo firewall, but the best way to speed up a notebook is to disable useless service and startup that come with a thinkpad PC, and still keep using your macfree antivirus and firewall, try running msconfig to clean up your registry....
Thanks for the suggestions. I got rid of McAfee on her laptop and installed AVG's free antivirus instead. The computer is back to normal (and it found a couple of viruses that McAfee had failed to locate). I have yet to install a 3rd party firewall (had to do all of this on my lunchbreak and only have the Windows firewall up). A couple of more questions. The laptop uses the wireless internet through a router on my pc. Do I still need to get a firewall since the router should have one (thought I read that). Also, does the free zone alarm firewall take up a lot of resources? I want to keep the laptop running normally, which it is finally doing. Thanks for all the help everyone!
