F***ING Hourglass

johnnyrotten

My Laptop has recently slowed down something terrible.
for example I right click on the desktop and I get the hourglass for about 5-10 secs.
Its an 18month old Centrino with 512 mb Ram, 40GB HD ( 20 GB free )
I've defragged
HELP!

Ruu_Old

Windows XP I assume?
Download CCleaner (Slim version without the toolbar) and give it a sweep. Have you got anti spyware software? If so, give that a run also.

johnnyrotten

Yep XP, I'll try it , thanks

L31mr0d

You NEED a defrag. Seen this problem on many computers, the hanging is due to your MFT becoming extremely fragmented, causing your drive to spend excessive amounts of time searching on your disk. You need to get a decent defragmenter (NOT the bundled MS one, which is rubbish) and first increase the size of your MFT, then defragment it and move it to the center of your disk platter. After this you'll need to defragment the whole drive, extensively. At a certain level of defragmentation your MFT will no longer be able to find critical system files, at that point be prepared for BSODs and a system format. I'd get on this ASAP.

A program to start with would be O&O defragmenter.

johnnyrotten

L31mr0d wrote:

You NEED a defrag. Seen this problem on many computers, the hanging is due to your MFT becoming extremely fragmented, causing your drive to spend excessive amounts of time searching on your disk. You need to get a decent defragmenter (NOT the bundled MS one, which is rubbish) and first increase the size of your MFT, then defragment it and move it to the center of your disk platter. After this you'll need to defragment the whole drive, extensively. At a certain level of defragmentation your MFT will no longer be able to find critical system files, at that point be prepared for BSODs and a system format. I'd get on this ASAP.

A program to start with would be O&O defragmenter.

Sorry , but I'm no expert and all the Abbreiations are new to me. Can you be more specific on what each means . How do I move it to the center of the disc platter??? Thanks

Ghost Train

centrino should be okay with xp, if the programs you're running are normal apps they should run okay, if disk space is low it could be the issue or else probably spyware, Spybot - Search & Destroy might help

tuxy

In some case's backing up important stuff and a reformat and reinstall is faster then cleaning up(should also work 100% of the time)

But cleaning all spyware off the system and a defrag is the option to go for you if a reinstall is too incontinent.

byte

johnnyrotten wrote:

Sorry , but I'm no expert and all the Abbreiations are new to me. Can you be more specific on what each means . How do I move it to the center of the disc platter??? Thanks

MFT is Master File Table. Info link:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/ntfs/archMFT-c.html

O&O is software, here is link to O&O Defrag:
http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodefrag/