Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[John Broome <jbroome AT gmail.com>]

Calvin Powers wrote:
> 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.


There's no way the CPU in a T43p is 366mhz.  That may be what's showing
with it throttled down for power savings, if it really was 366mhz then
it wouldn't support 2gb of ram.

Is the AV running a realtime scan?  that could hammer the snot out of a
hard drive.  I could see lots of disk activity with 512 mb ram,
especially running office and outlook at the same time; it would be
swapping like a madman to disk.