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

["Scott G. Hall" <ScottGHall AT BellSouth.Net>]

Calvin Powers wrote:
> 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.

There are three common possible causes to this:
a) filesystem fragmentation
b) virtual memory usage
c) disk hardware misalignment causes head resync's

A) Make sure your sister runs a good defragmenting utility minimize head
   seeking for parts of a file (like DLL's and other larger files).
   Please note that NTFS file systems end up seeking a lot to their root
   when finding fragments and file parts scattered throughout the disk.

   Make sure too to run a registry checking & repair utility in case one
   of the system DLL's is trying to find a file that doesn't exist any
   more.  Registry problems can wreck havoc with a system too.

B) One of the better solutions for memory page swapping problems is to
   create a separate small 2GB partition, and a single big file in it
   for the Win-XP swap.  This seems more stable than sharing sectors of
   the same big filesystem as the rest of your files -- and will help
   minimize fragmentation in the future.

C) There are times when a laptop is bumped the right way that the harddisk
   heads are knocked slightly out of alignment.  For inner tracks the head
   will see one alignment, and for outer tracks a possibly different
   alignment.  This becomes a problem with the low-level formatting being
   in a slightly different alignment than new reads and writes to the disk,
   causing a lot of re-reads of sector information.

   The recommended best solution for this is to re-low-level-format the
   harddisk, recreate partitions and filesystems (keeping #B above in
   mind), and reinstall the operating system.  That way all information
   on the disk is written with the current head alignment.  After reloading
   all of the OS and software, it is a good idea to check the registry
   again, because MS patches tends to corrupt the registry.

--
Scott G. Hall
Raleigh, NC, USA
ScottGHall AT BellSouth.Net