Date: 04/26/06 (Computer Geeks)    Keywords: software, browser, virus, antivirus, spyware

     I have a C3500 averatec. It's been crawling lately, and I can't figure out exactly why..
     I've been taking good care of the laptop since I knew there would be no free legitimate way I could reinstall windows XP tablet onto this machine (no CDs came with the laptop, or so I remember.) But nonetheless the laptop is getting a little bit more unbearable everyday:

The computer starts to crawl randomly if I copy and paste something big (such as a photoshop file, lengthy amounts of text, or sometimes even screenshots). Sometimes it recovers, sometimes it doesn't. It used to recover all the time. I can use it normally, but nowadays I seem to be shutting it off by holding down the power button because the laptop becomes very very slow to repond, rather than shutting it off properly.

The laptop usualy starts to crawl after 4~5 hours of use, which consists mainly of firefox, trillian, and ultraedit(text editor). Once in a while I also play a 3D game called RagnarokOnline and use photoshop to draw stuff. Gaming or using photoshop doesn't effect when the laptop gets sluggy - it seems to be kind of random. I didn't install any file sharing programs on the laptop except bittorrent original.

I scanned for spyware and ad-ware using spybot, ad-aware, and I ran hijackthis to make sure no strange browser help objects were installed. Nothing.

I also checked in windows registry to make sure only what was needed was running and made sure nothing else was starting up when windows starts through msconfig. Nothing suspicious there..

I also removed everything but two shortcuts (antivirus and a gamma correction software written by adobe) in the Startup folder in the start menu.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling firefox since at first the computer was freezing up mostly when I was leaving firefox open for long periods of time, but later I realised that it was freezing equally as much when I'd try to use a file browser to look at what files I have in a folder. I tried turning file indexing back on hoping that would help explorer list files faster, but so far I don't feel any difference.

I've spend the past few weekends checking for errors on the hard disk and defragmenting the data on it. Currently 20GB out of the 74.5GB available is empty. Defragging didn't lessen the crashes, and no errors were reported from disk error checking. I used the disk checker and disk defrager that was included with windows XP to do these tasks.

Usually when the laptop crawls, the hard disk light goes blink.. blink.. blink.. and all buttons become unresponsive. The curser usually still moves, but the momement will be jerky. The screen stops responding to clicking, and then once in a while it lets out angry long beeps as if I clicked the desktop 100 times in 2 seconds.

The laptop used to have a overheating problem but now that I open it up once  a season to clean out the innards, the heat problem is almost gone. The laptop still gets burning hot during gaming, so I try not to game for more than 15 minutes at a time.

The laptop is about 10 months old. I dropped a few times and have a corner chipped, but nothing seemed to be wrong with it right after the drops. The specs are kind of like this:

I thought the RAM amount was 512MB, but it shows up as 480MB.. I'm puzzled.
Maybe it was always like this.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computergeeks/916615.html