What Causes A Computer To Run Slow

[dgood]

I'm talking really slow! A computer that should be quite fast. Its a core 2 duo t7200 or something. With 2gb of ram. It's a laptop. I've reformatted it and yet it still persists to be as slow as molasses.
Opening documents in Office 2007 can take up to 5 min to just open a 1pg word document. When the same file is opened on another computer it opens quickly as you would expect. This computer also loses connectivity with the printer very often. Such as it will sit in the print queue and never print until you restart the computer and it sends it through. It is the biggest mystery to me. I've reinstalled everything, drivers and operating system full reformat and nothing new. The computer just doesn't want to run how it should. So annoying that I wonder if it's a hardware issue that just wont' cause windows to crash. Any ideas? I'd love a response or two.

[stopthekilling77]

Test your RAM? Run SpinRite on your hard drive as well. (in recovery mode)
A bad hard drive may be the cause of your slow computing, I'd be surprised if it's not the case, actually.

[Apoptosis]

hum... could be memory like mentioned above if you already did a full format and a re-install of windows.

[GI-JOE]

Anything overheating at all? Since I assume its a laptop.

[hnzw_rui]

My bet is on the hard drive, too. My Dad's PC was running really slow although it was clean and CPU (Pentium DC E2160) is more robust compared to other PC's in the house. After cancelling a really slow file transfer operation (~10MB/s), I checked the device manager. Apparently, the OS hard drive was using PIO which is why it was lagging so much.

Yours might be dying, though, so I'd refrain from putting any important data on there without a backup.

[Major_A]

I ran into a similar situation a couple years back. It turned out that the hard drive was dying. It took a while to diagnose this seeing as SMART showed no errors and I didn't hear any clicking from the drive.

Download BootVIS and upload the graph.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=664

[dgood]

Ironically to all. The problem was not the laptop per se. As I suspected as I did run a memory test and reformatted it to fix it. The computer was still slow. It was the docking station. For some reason the docking station was causing documents to open slow and the internet to go slow and just was like everything was in molasses. Now I don't know how the docking station slows down the computer when it's bad I just noticed the trend that when off the station (which it almost never was) it was fine. I put it on another station and it worked perfectly. Anyone had a dock go bad? and yet still have it "function"?

I swear I bring you guys the most bizarre problems with computers and I appreciate the help I receive here. And the awesome reviews.

[DMB2000uk]

It's never a simple problem when you know about computers, else it wouldn't really be a problem otherwise ;)

Dan

[moon111]

Would it have a different hardware profile while docked? It's been a LONG time since I've dealt with notebooks and docking stations. Maybe one profile is messed or missing a driver or something?

[dgood]

I don't think so as when on another identical dock it works fine so it's a dock problem not the laptop as I found.

[stev]

Anything overheating at all? Since I assume its a laptop.

Exactly!

When was the last time the vents were sucked out to get the dust bunnies removed?

Most CPU's throttle back in speed if the temps rise.