Hardware? problems with Dell 9400

[bryanbdp]

I have a dell inspiron 9400 which I bought new several years back. Until recently, I have been running it using win 8 64 bit with no problems. I have 4gb memory, and a SSD installed. Has T7200 processor.
The fans were getting noisy, so I just replaced both of them. They both seems to be working, and the CPU/GPU, chipset temperatures all seem fine.

I have just installed a new Kingston 240GB SSD, with a fresh copy of windows 8.1. I have loaded Netscape and Adobe reader, then gave up as things were so slow.
All the heat sink fins are nice and clean.
I brought the machine to Staples and they ran comprehensive hardware scans with no result.
Typing is really slow, programs are really sluggish.
I ordered a new (new takeout) mobo, since I don't see many other options...
Any other suggestions or advice???

 

[C12Friedman]

In BIOS check to ensure your SSD is formatted as NTFS and not FAT32 also that it is set as AHCI or RAID rather than IDE.

 

[bryanbdp]

It is set to NTFS. However, I don't see any option in the bios to set AHCI. It's an older laptop, I'm not sure it supports it. If there's no option in the bios, is that pretty conclusive that there no other option than IDE? Or is there a way to change it?

I swapped in a new motherboard, which seems to work much better, except for a lousy power jack connection. I installed the latest Nvidia driver which seemed to cause some slowdown, so I rolled the driver back to the one from the standard 8.1 installation.

I wish the laptop manufacturers would get their shit together and put a power whip cable attached to the mother board with a plug, which could be replaced, and wouldn't stress the power jack. A few inches could extend out the back of the case, and the power plug could attach to the end of the cable. Don't want to solder on a new mother board, but I'm sure thinking about it...

Thanks for your reply,
Bryan

 

[C12Friedman]

How is your fan noise now? Does it vary wildly or stay steady and normal sounding? What program are you using to monitor temps?

 

[bryanbdp]

Hi. Fans were making a racket before, after 5 years or running. There is normal fan noise now.
I used I8kfanGUI to monitor fan function and temperatures when I was using an old hard drive loaded with windows 7 32 bit, but it won’t run on 8.1 64 bit because of the unsigned driver, unfortunately. Temps were always pretty normal ~ 50C or so, I clean the fins on the heat sinks fairly often.
The new motherboard has helped a lot, I suspect a problem with the SATA bus may have been the problem.
Thanks,
bryan

 

[C12Friedman]

I'm glad the motherboard swap worked, I had figured it was not going to be needed... good job, enjoy

As an FYI here (I might as well be somewhat helpful), SpeedFan and CoreTemp are both popular temp monitoring programs, available free, they should work with your CPU