Laptop taking LONG time to do things


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My wife has an el cheapo HP laptop that runs Win 8.1. Her demands on it are very light- usually facebook, email, and Pinterest. I don't recall the specs off the top of my head, and can't easily grab them since I'm working about 4 hours away.

The laptop will suddenly seize up and we can do nothing until it lets go of whatever is going on. I've looked in Task Manager, and see that the disk is at 100% (not capacity- she has plenty of free space.) It has something hitting it hard, but I can't figure out what. I've run disk scans (no errors) and virus scans (no virus detected) and am not sure what is causing this.

Any suggestions on where to look, or what else to check?

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My wife has an el cheapo HP laptop that runs Win 8.1. Her demands on it are very light- usually facebook, email, and Pinterest. I don't recall the specs off the top of my head, and can't easily grab them since I'm working about 4 hours away.

The laptop will suddenly seize up and we can do nothing until it lets go of whatever is going on. I've looked in Task Manager, and see that the disk is at 100% (not capacity- she has plenty of free space.) It has something hitting it hard, but I can't figure out what. I've run disk scans (no errors) and virus scans (no virus detected) and am not sure what is causing this.

Any suggestions on where to look, or what else to check?

Either run some various malware/anti virus scans and check and see if it needs to be cleaned out. My boss had a Toshiba and his fan vents were clogged with hair, dust that caused over heating. I took the laptop apart and cleaned out all the vents and that alone fixed it.

 

http://mashable.com/2008/01/05/10-online-virus-malware-scanners/

https://www.virustotal.com/en/

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In Task Manager, go to the Processes tab and click the 'Disk' column to sort it by activity percentage.

Look at what process has the highest % activity.

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I've looked in Task Manager, and see that the disk is at 100%

 

The processes and users tab in task manager both show the percentage for each process.

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I'll have her try these tonight, I will also have her run a scan, but she never downloads things so I am *reasonably* confident there shouldn't be anything (meaning, I am leaving in a chunk of room to be wrong since there are bad actors online everywhere, and even legit places can be victimized to deliver crap.)

 

Thanks for the suggestions!

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Oh- and one problem we have is when it jumps up to 100%, the machine is almost completely unresponsive, so it hasn't been easy to make it work, but I can work around that by doing so when it is loafing along. ;)

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I'll say the obvious that people haven't said yet, check the event viewer, it's probably going to be disk errors/IO read errors, when I see this it's usually the hard drive failing.

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Try disabling Skype (ie. quitting it completely from its task tray icon, next to the clock [right-click --> Quit]); this surprisingly solved the issues I was having with Flash video freezing on my older XP laptop every 30 seconds.

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Is chrome installed?  There's a bug with it where it sets the timer resolution to 1ms always regardless unlike Firefox and IE which only set it while needing to do videos.

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If it's an el'cheapo HP 8.1 laptop it's probably got an AMD E series CPU. Which gets bogged down by opening notepad.

 

How did you check your hard drive?

 

I'd recommend downloading HD tune trial and doing a error scan on the disk (Not the quick scan)

 

http://www.hdtunepro.com ..

 

from what you've described it sounds like bad sectors.

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Well one thing I recently experienced on my laptop was the hard drive was very slightly unseated the thing would take 20min to boot up and another 10 to open the internet

 

I just popped it out and back in and it worked fine afterwords    

 

just something to check if you have the time

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As it turns out, the drive is going bad so I have a new one coming in and will replace it this weekend. It passes all the tests- until I look at the event viewer and see a LOT of warnings and errors.

 

And yup- it has the AMD E series processor. She bought it without asking me about it. 

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