Staggeringly slow HD

[Splat]

Afternoon all,

I have an old laptop, Dell Inspiron 7000 running W2K (300 Mhz I think, 330 Ram, 4GB HD), and the hard drive seems to take ages. Starting up, it takes nearly 5 minutes. During applications, it's always the HD that slows it down, rarely the CPU. I'm not running hardly anything on it, it's used for just Word/Excel, and a bit of internet through another PC (USB linked).

My question is, is there anything I can do to speed things up? I've run defrag, and also run PCpitstop, and that does not report anything. Can I get a faster drive installed, is that an option?

My other box, running tons of stuff (but on XP, not a laptop) boots up in seconds!

Cheers

Splat

[SyllogismCheck]

Most likely just the ravages of old age and time slowing things down, bad sectors being skipped across and worked around. Laptops get a hard time with vibration and being knocked about etc and the HD suffers most when this happens whilst its running. Have put up in the past with a drive with about 25% bad sectors before replacing it, now that did get slow. Trying an error check (with 'scan and attempt recovery of bad sectors') before your next defrag may help. If not then try a format and software rebuild from scratch, sometimes the disk becomes to fragmented to be usefully defragged.

Laptop drives have got faster over the years and are available cheaply now. They simply slide out and back in so easy to replace. The problem you may face is that the bios of an old machine like you describe may not have large disk support making it unable to 'see' even the smallest disks available these days and finding a bios update for an old machine can be tricky.

If its still a useful tool you may, I'm afraid, just have to live with it and accept that its not going to be as fast as modern stuff.

Oh one last thought, if all else fails more memory would help, cheap as chips now and takes the load off the HD to some extent.

[Splat]

Thanks for that. I might look into a faster drive. It's not been that long since I put a fresh copy of w2k on there. Memory slots are full. I really don't want to spend that much on it, as I could buy a new one for not very much!

Cheers Splat

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Splat,

When was the last time you installed the OS, and was it a fresh install from the CABs or was it an upgrade?

Take Care,

Richard

P.S. A fresh install of your OS will greatly speed up your old computer. (Do not forget to download all the latest drivers and put them on a CD before doing the install.)

[Splat]

Thanks Richard.

It was a fresh install not long ago. It previously had W98 on it, so I wiped it out and put on W2K.

The disk looks a real mess looking at the defrags, lots of it it will not clean up. I have also tried formating the disk, but that does not work either. Bizzarly, the disk has an extra partition on it, and comes up as an E drive. This is just 15K, and I cannot seem to get rid of it, hence why I think the disk is screwed.

Happy to clear the whole lot down and start again, but as I said, the formating of the disk just does not coco.

Cheers

Splat

[Splat]

TCS,

Thanks for that,. I'll do a search for that patch - bet that's what I need!

Cheers

Splat

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Splat,

I agree with TCS, you would do better on that notebook running Win98.

If you make a boot disk and put fdisk on it, you can go in and delete the two partitions and create one new partition on the drive.

Take Care,

Richard

[Splat]

Muchas gracias......


Splat