Boot to a BART or Knoppix CD to check on behavior without using
the HD. If performance is acceptable, nuke and pave (ie re-load that sucka).
Regards,
Jim Ray, President
Neuse River Networks
tel: 919-838-1672 x111 cell: 919-606-1772
http://www.neuserivernetworks.com
Founded in
1997, Neuse River Networks is a Raleigh, NC based IT Outsourcing Partner that
is committed to specialized customer solutions to reduce costs and increase
productivity with The ONE Plan. By taking a proactive approach The ONE
Plan is designed to manage your computer network so you don’t have to.
Since its inception Neuse River Networks has built its foundation on earning
the trust of its customers and will continue to strive toward this standard of
excellence.
Contact Information:
Customer Referrals:
sales AT neuserivernetworks.com
Customer Service/Support:
support AT neuserivernetworks.com
From:
internetworkers-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:internetworkers-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Calvin
Powers
Sent: Friday, September 25, 2009 11:15 AM
To: Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/
Subject: [internetworkers] Finding Source of Hard Drive Churn
Greetings,
Once again I find myself turning to the collective wisdom of Internetworkers.
This time it has to do with my sister's latptop.
She has a Thinkpad T43p laptop with wndows XP. She says nothing seems to
be obviously broken, it's just incredibly slow. She says the hard drive light
stays on almost constantly and net browsing and e-mail downloading gets so slow
that the machine is more or less locked up, but the hard drive light is
constantly going. She says that this problem has existed for a while but
got noticeably worse when she upgraded to the latest MS Office and Outlook.
She claims that her AV subscription is up to date and that scans have not found
any problems.
She is in Texas so I do not have access to the machine itself. But I looked it
up online and the machine came with just 512Mb of memory. So I had her upgrade
it to 2Gb and she says she can't tell that it has gotten any better.
I also noted that the specs for this machine are just 366Mhz CPU, which I think
is kinda slow by today's standards, but I can't think why that would cause the
hard drive light to stay on constantly.
She also says that if she shuts down all the programs, the machine will get to
the state where the hard drive light is not on constantly, but it still
flickers fairly continuously.
Looking at the task manager, the CPU meter stays in the 12-15% range. She can't
see any obvious trend in the process list in terms of one process taking more
CPU time than another. I had her do a netstat command and send me the
results. While there were a couple of connections I could not explain, there
were a fairly small number of internet connections active. (and the netowrk
conection meter on the task manager) shows 0% usage or almost 0% usage when all
known programs are shut down.
I would gladly entertain any suggestions on things to check. But my main
question for internetworkers is, "how can I determine what's causing the
constant hard drive activity?" Also, are there any hard drive diagnostic
tools she could run to determine if the hard drive is having trouble?
Thanks In Advance,
Calvin
