Laptop Help Needed!

ScottishA4B9

ScottishA4B9

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Hello All!

All of a sudden my laptop has started freezing up all the time and being really slow. This even happens when doing a simple task with nothing going on in the background. I have defragged the hard drives etc but nothing seems to have worked. I have a little CPU monitor programme and it shows my laptop running at 100% virtually all the time. I have my laptop on a cooling pad all the time so it stays nice and cool and I have the CPU running at a limit of 90%.
I have 89GB of free on the hard drive.

My laptop is an HP Pavilion DV6 and it has an AMD Turion(tm) x2 Dual -Core Mobile RM-74 2.20Ghz Processor and has 3GB of RAM and running Windows Vista 32 Bit.
Is there anything I can do or can I upgrade it? If I upgrade the RAM, will that work? and will that wipe everything on my laptop?

I appreciate any help anybody can give me.

Many Thanks in advance.
 
Try starting in safe mode and running malwarebytes or spybot search and destroy.
 
You can upgrade to windows 8, could be worth you raining your local tech to sort it all out for you.
 
My advice would be watch a YouTube tutorial if possible, but I think there's a way you can simply pop the disc in and upgrade while keeping your stuff. But usually you should do a whole fresh install.
 
Thanks for the great advice so far guys! I'm abit of a biff with computers as you can see!
 
Last edited:
If you are getting random freezes and slow performance it's definitely worth getting the hard drive checked out. If its having trouble reading/writing then even the simplest action can take an age making the machine look like its stalled...

Nothing worse than embarking on a series of upgrades only to find that the hard drive is dying making everything else pretty pointless :)

Just speaking from years of hard drive bad luck experience...
 
Looks like I had some adware crap on there. Trying to get rid of then with the program's above but they seem to stall
 
You could consider an ssd hard drive, they're amazing! I put one in my laptop and the Mrs imac, it's made a huge difference to performance on both. I guess it all depends on how difficult it is to access your hdd slot in your laptop though.
 
After the above spyware tools listed above, run ComboFix Download Combofix on it. It's the only program that can find stubborn viruses/spyware. And then definitely upgrade your RAM, it will be like night and day.
 
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crazy88 said:
You could consider an ssd hard drive, they're amazing! I put one in my laptop and the Mrs imac, it's made a huge difference to performance on both. I guess it all depends on how difficult it is to access your hdd slot in your laptop though.
Click to expand...
Yeah but the SSD have very low GB capacity and HUGE price. I have tried the two above programs, but they seem to find malware but then stop working when I request them to be removed! GRRRR.......
 
JudderMan said:
After the above spyware tools listed above, run ComboFix Download Combofix on it. It's the only program that can find stubborn viruses/spyware. And then definitely upgrade your RAM, it will be like night and day.
Click to expand...

This^^^^^^

And you'll probably also find that running combofix frees up loads of disc space you didn't even know you were using.
 
Ads said:
This^^^^^^

And you'll probably also find that running combofix frees up loads of disc space you didn't even know you were using.
Click to expand...

Six Hogbolins and I still think you've been drinking to be agreeing with me about the OP's thread...it's an odd feeling ;)
 
1st thing to check in these events of 100% cpu is to check task manager & processes to see what's running at high cpu, memory is irrelevant until you find out what's hugging the processor.

If its an svchost, then you need to expand this by downloading processexplorer.exe from Microsoft, this will tell you what each svchost is actually running in the background aswell as show all processes running, when you can see what's hanging everything, you can search online for common things eg. "xxxx at 100% cpu" xxx being the process running.

Combofix is 1 to try after a proper malwarebytes/antivirus scan aswell as a rootkit scanner I cant recall the name of right now.

If its malware/rootkit etc which wont delete automatically, then try this site which is very good usually for info on removal:

Bleeping Computer Technical Support Forums

Also if it wont delete automatically with scanning software, 1st backup your files, then disable system restore as some hide in the restore backup data & auto reinstall themselves when software finds them in C: & removes that instance, only to be replaced by a new copy from restore data.

Logical process just needed for these things, I don't miss doing this kind of work that's for sure, for people that just don't listen lol.

As for memory, only look at this when you know whats causing cpu high & fixed, then maybe consider an HDD upgrade aswell & tbh mate, a Samsung 840 256GB ssd pro which runs at about 500MB read/write (if sata3 controller fitted), is about £130 these days which is cheap & 3 x your current one, very good drive & low power consumption & shock proof being solid state as such.
 
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As for HDDs, I'm runnung a 287GB (don't know the exact capacity) hard drive with 91GB free.
I have seen replacement 1TB hard drives for £65 and 250GB SSD Drives for £149. Now my head is telling me the 1TB would be the best to go for but what is the best one? I save alot of stuff on my external portable hard drives.
 
Scottish, forget the hdd atm, fix the problem 1st, 96GB is plenty left atm, you probably have a load of temp files that could be deleted removing some space aswell, sometimes this alone can be several GB, adding more GB wont fix your high cpu problems.

If its difficult for you to resolve, then setup logmein account using the free version which has a pro trial, then I could maybe login quickly & see what's hogging the cpu
 
Hi mate do the usual virus scan, malwarebytes scan, hijack this scan, check drivers are installed properly
 
ScottishS3 said:
Thanks guys. Will do.
Click to expand...

hi mate just make sure you do this so it should lag a lot less,

Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Performance Information and Tools

then on left click adjust visual affects, choose adjust for best performance, then click okay. restart pc, then run the scans. Makes it a lot easier.
 
ScottishS3 said:
Hello All!

All of a sudden my laptop has started freezing up all the time and being really slow. This even happens when doing a simple task with nothing going on in the background. I have defragged the hard drives etc but nothing seems to have worked. I have a little CPU monitor programme and it shows my laptop running at 100% virtually all the time. I have my laptop on a cooling pad all the time so it stays nice and cool and I have the CPU running at a limit of 90%.
I have 89GB of free on the hard drive.

My laptop is an HP Pavilion DV6 and it has an AMD Turion(tm) x2 Dual -Core Mobile RM-74 2.20Ghz Processor and has 3GB of RAM and running Windows Vista 32 Bit.
Is there anything I can do or can I upgrade it? If I upgrade the RAM, will that work? and will that wipe everything on my laptop?

I appreciate any help anybody can give me.

Many Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

Well half you trouble is windows vista. We're abouts are you based?
 
Well I have run malwarebytes or spybot search and destroy on every setting from safe mode to best performance and they both just fail to initiate after finding 'adwares'.
 
sliced said:
hi mate just make sure you do this so it should lag a lot less,

Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Performance Information and Tools

then on left click adjust visual affects, choose adjust for best performance, then click okay. restart pc, then run the scans. Makes it a lot easier.
Click to expand...
Tried that one and my CPU went down to 0.8% being used. Put it back up 'let windows decide whats best' and it went up to 98%-100% of the CPU being used!!!
 
Patrick_c99 said:
Vista is the most unstable, unreliable version of windows ever created.

It drains computer resources just being left on and not doing anything. The coding is messy which makes it slow
Click to expand...
Thanks! I do remember hearing that it had some kind of problem. Is it better updating to something like Windows 8 64bit? Where can I get one from and how easy would it be to upgrade?
 
So glad I skipped Vista, my desktop is still running Windows XP with very few issues, latest laptops all running Windows7, which has been good to me. Not a fan of 8 though.
 
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