Urgent: Computer running super slow and crashing

Sass1278

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May 3, 2013
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Hey,
I desperately need help from smarter people than me, got essay deadline and a broken laptop.

I have a 4 year old laptop (Sony Vaio AW series 64 bit) which was running fine, had only basic office programs on it as I use it mainly for Office, Chrome and VLC player, but after a random restart (no particular reason to restart) it BSOD'd on me during a startup and refused to start up (went into a loop with BSOD at the end) and when went into system repair refused to do anything at all, just blank standard Windows 7 (blue with flowers) screen indefinitely with no menus or mouse. I have no idea what the error was as the BSOD appeared only for split of a second. After countless tries to start the system, I formated the HDD and reinstalled Win 7 to avoid god knows what software issue it might have had. Everything looked fine, perhaps seemed a bit slower than usual, started installing updates/new programs and during restart (Win update) it just hung onto "Shutting down" screen for 1.5 hours after which I formatted the HDD again and reinstalled the Win 7 without running any updates as I needed it to finish my essay in 2 days time and just accepted limited functionality for the time being.

It worked (with no drivers or anything installed, only Win 7, Nod32, Chrome and Office) for a day, then all of a sudden it stopped going online even though it said it had connection. Only thing that was done meanwhile was Word and Chrome. Then it went super duper slow and started crashing on every possible task, even typing up a sentence would crash it for a minute. I tried restarting it, it responded with refusal to start-up again.

I inserted Win 7 disk and ran system restore to last restore point, it gave an error that there has been an error and restore could not be completed but after restart it turned on but it took it about 20 minutes to do so (normal start-up time ca 1 min) and is now running so slow that only the mouse moves fine but rest is effectively impossible to use due to lag. As an example, I tried opening Chrome about 3 minutes ago and it just now reacted to it.

During system repair it tried automatically fixing startup issue and came up with report looking like:

Problem signature
Problem Event name: StartupRepairOffline
Problem Signature 01: 6.1.7600.16385
Problem Signature 02: 6.1.7600.16385
Problem Signature 03: unknown
Problem Signature 04: 0
Problem Signature 05: Externalmedia
Problem Signature 06: 1
Problem Signature 07: BadPatch
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033

If it's software, then how comes two HDD formats and clean reinstalls of Win7 didn't fix that? If it's hardware, what is it that allows PC to run but at super-slow speeds?

On that long story, any ideas what it might be? Should I just get a new laptop?

Help please?

Cheers,
Alex
 
Solution
"If it's hardware, what is it that allows PC to run but at super-slow speeds?"
Either your RAM or your HDD are failing. How many RAM modules does the VAIO have? If its 2, then remove one at a time and see if there is any difference in stability. If there's no improvement, suspect the HDD.
If you only have a single RAM module then take it to a repair shop before you go and buy a new HDD, at least they can try new RAM to see if it makes any difference.
By the way, computers ALWAYS break down at a crucial moment, I guess its a 'feature' of Windows!

Barhumbug

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Jul 26, 2013
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"If it's hardware, what is it that allows PC to run but at super-slow speeds?"
Either your RAM or your HDD are failing. How many RAM modules does the VAIO have? If its 2, then remove one at a time and see if there is any difference in stability. If there's no improvement, suspect the HDD.
If you only have a single RAM module then take it to a repair shop before you go and buy a new HDD, at least they can try new RAM to see if it makes any difference.
By the way, computers ALWAYS break down at a crucial moment, I guess its a 'feature' of Windows!
 
Solution

pchelper652

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Oct 30, 2013
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You might want to try the following to troubleshoot to if it is a hardware problem or software problem.

Checking your Hardware
Yes, Physically cleaning your computer can help reduce the heat build up. If it is a laptop you can buy a fan to place under your laptop to cool it down. Check to see in your task monitor if you are using alot of RAM or cpu cycles. If you are using up a large percentage of your RAM you probably need upgrade to more RAM or use less programs at the same time. If you CPU is continously spiking, it could be your computer is overheating or you have a program that using it. You can try to find and kill it using your task monitor.

Cleaning Up Your OS
1) run chdsk on your harddrive to see if you have any bad sectors
2) try degfraging your harddrive
4) if using a lot of ram try uninstalling some of your unused software
You can try some software to fix some of these problem if you dont want to do it manually.
Checkout http://solvingpcproblems.com
 

mrego1122

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Mar 19, 2014
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