Laptop lacking performance

sand_man

sand_man

Honorary Master
Joined
Jun 4, 2005
Messages
40,511
Reaction score
10,941
Location
Johannesburg
Evening all

My problem is the following and I hate to be vague but that's how it is...

I have a 4 month old HP Pavillion DV9291 with 2GB of of DDR Ram and a 2.0ghtz intel 7200 processor, the laptop is running on windows vista home premium but my issue is the lack of performance.

For example running a nortons system scan the cpu is running at 100% which makes innitiating any other applications rather tedious and slow process.

There is no doubt in my mind that this laptop is suffering from some sort of hardware failure but what? I did a fresh installation yesterday and despite not having any 3rd party software on themachine other than vista it's not performing.

Anyone care to shed some light on my predicament?
 
Why not get a benchmark program and then compare results with other laptops of similar/same spec. Might help you narrow down where the problem is.
 
Menace said:
Why not get a benchmark program and then compare results with other laptops of similar/same spec. Might help you narrow down where the problem is.
Click to expand...


My partner has the same laptop and they behave very differently yes.
For example the cooling fan on mine seems to be very audible and runs constantly seldom switching off while I seldom hear his cooling fan running
 
A couple of months back I was doing something or other on the laptop, don't remember what but I do remember it froze and I couldnt reboot it, I removed the battery and eventually after 20 attempts it switched on. Now when I try restart it, it swiches off but wont switch back on. I have to wait about 20 seconds and then manually switch it back on...
 
Sounds like you need to send it in for warranty.
Somehow I get the feeling though that it's out of warranty.

In my experience lack of performance on notebooks are caused by memmory or hard disks.
Often find bad sectors on laptop drives which causes it to freeze or slow down!
 
I'm going to take it HP in the morning me thinks.

Paid 17.2k for it, 4 months ago so whatever may be wrong with it had better be covered by the warranty...
 
Between me and you I had windows media center on the unit for most of the 4 months I've had it but it came preloaded with vista and I will have issues with any warranty claim if I take it in for repairs with media center running on it.

To be honest it was far more stable on media center and performance was way better by still not what a dual core should be producing!! I have an AMD 3600+ AM2 on my desktop and there is no comparison in terms of the performance, just not right, this unit has to be faulty...
 
The_Librarian said:
Same here.

If XP works better for you than Vista, stick with XP.
Click to expand...

Agreed, however it's not performing as it should regardless of operating system, I'm convinced and I hope that HP will be able to resolve any issues. My experience in the past with repairing damaged goods is it can be broken before going in for a repair but it comes back more damaged then before...
 
firstly get rid of norton

secondly turn off hdd indexing

right click on your c: and untick it

then type run msconfig, click services and untick superfetch
 
killadoob said:
secondly turn off hdd indexing
Click to expand...

I'm following your advice but turning off the indexing has innitiated an applying attributes to the folder action which has been running for about 30 minutes already and is still busy. Is that normal?
 
I had a sharp decrease in performance on my laptop a little while ago. After much fussing etc etc I found the problem to be the drive for some reason was running in PIO mode (very slow and CPU intensive) instead of DMA.

To check that this is or isn't the case: (xp instructions, might have to adapt a little to vista)
Right click my computer and go to properties OR go to "system" in the control panel
Click "Hardware" tab
Click "Device Manager" button
Expand "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers"
Go to the controller you disk is connected to (most likely the first one) and right click, properties
Click the "primary channel" tab and check what transfer mode the disk is in
 
LOL same thing happens when I try sharing folders.

Vista really really sucks. I would go WinXP + AVG AntiVirus.
 
sandman i just learned how to stop my freakin windows from reading 15mb a sec

go type services

move down to where you find windows search and disable it
 
new to the world of computers.... Help

Best comp for beginners.. any suggestions?
 
re 'best computer for beginners' - well, if its for an adult, then its much of a muchness - they're all pretty much standard. You have to ask yourself what you intend to do with the pc. Its a tool.
Are you just gonna open and close documents, or are you going to play games and watch movies and fiddle with video conversion etc etc.. if the latter, then you need decent amount of ram, hard drive size, and a good graphics card. If the former, then any old pc will do.

If the pc is for a 'kid' - then hmm, perhaps something not so expensive or heavy duty - until they've learned not to destroy it :)
 
dualmeister said:
LOL same thing happens when I try sharing folders.

Vista really really sucks. I would go WinXP + AVG AntiVirus.
Click to expand...

*groan* please don't start this ...Vista is fine, there is something wrong with that machine, HP has a fab extended warranty. I once had a Compaq develop a row of dead pixels and they sent out a tech to fix it (yes as in: to my house), he couldn't so he replaced it there and then - really excellent service!

Further: I'd recommend against AVG as it forced me to reformat once after chucking is own infected .exe into quarantine. That actual programmers could have missed such a logic knot defies ...well ...logic. :o

I have had a very good experience with Avast! antivirus - they require you to register but its free.
 
No, NO. Dualmeister hit the nail on the head.

"LOL same thing happens when I try sharing folders. Vista really really sucks."

This is the issue here, Vista needs at least 4GB to run properly. Install 98.

btw try the Vista compatability and reliability packs, they seem to have helped a lot of people with the disk indexing and general performance, some fixes sepcifically for laptops.
 
Last edited:
I had similar issues until I removed Norton. Changed to NOD32. Machine runs like a dream now!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X