Super Slow Acer Aspire 5601 Laptop with 2GB RAM

[geokilla]

I have an Acer Aspire 5601 laptop with 2GB RAM. According to my father, he was using it, and left the laptop on while he left for lunch. During that 15 min lunch break, the laptop was converting video files using WinAVI Video Converter. When he came back, he found the laptop off. He powered the laptop back on and it's been SUPER SLOW ever since.

We've tried using Norton Ghost, and we tried using the Acer programs to restore it back to factory defaults. I ran Memtest+ 2.01 Test #5 and got 22 passes and all 8 tests and got 4 passes. So I'm sure that my RAM is fine.

I think the hard drive is dying. It takes forever to boot into Windows XP. I'm trying to boot into safe mode at the moment and I've been waiting for at least 10 min. The hard drive light is constantly lit and it never goes off. Heck I can't even hear the hard drive running.

Does anyone have an idea what's going on with the laptop? What should I do?

[dicecca112]

Run a SMART Test, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

[martini161]

same thing happened to my toshiba. does the hard drive make all these really loud clicking soudns alot?

[geokilla]

Called my dad just now and he said the laptop has been fixed. Turns out that Windows got corrupted somehow so he had to restore it after bypassing everything that was related to Windows.

Thanks for the tip dicecca, but I'm still trying to figure out how to run that SMART Test.

@martini, the hard drive doesn't make loud clicking sounds. You can hear the drive running and I guess you say that you can hear clicking sounds when it's doing disk defragmenting. Disk defragmenting takes forever though, so maybe that's why Windows got corrupted. I probably have a faulty hard drive.

[ibleet]

Not to be rude, but you may want to move this thread to the General mobile computing section.

[geokilla]

Actually, it's not clicking noises. I guess my hard drive is just louder than the average hard drives on the market.