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Hello folks,
My Toshiba Satellite A505 laptop with i3-330 processor and 4GB RAM has really slowed down and I can't figure out why. I consider myself pretty good with such issues, although not expert. I went through this forum for suggestions (as this is a rather common question posted here) and tried majority of the suggestions but no avail, so posting *my* question. The details follow.
- It started with hibernation not working. The machine won't hibernate, instead would shut down abnormally after a rather long (more than 5 mins) of humming. (Hibernation is very important to me as every night I hibernate the machine so that I can jump start my work as soon as I start the day).
- After wreaking head for about a week with this issue, I removed hibernate option and decided to use Sleep but that doesn't work either, IF I use sleep option from Shut Down menu. If I just let it sleep by not attending for 10 minutes, it would go in Sleep mode without any issues and even would boot normally. I seriously have no idea what is going on.
- It feels like the machine takes rather long time to access any file. You can see that by green bar on the address bar moving slowly. This is not only for the pictures but for any file.
- Booting takes really long time, about 5 mins. Even after you feel that booting is complete, I don't know what it does but it takes really long time to fire up any program or browser. Many times I go and make myself a cup of coffee and still its doing the job !!!
- Once you fire up the browser, any for that matter, it takes about 20-30 seconds to load home page which is google.com
I tried following things to see if it can improve on anything.
- I moved all large files to external HDD and defragmented HDD completely. Some of the files did not defragment. I presume they are system files or something.
- I checked whats in my startup and as many programs I could recognize, I removed majority of them, except the ones I want to start at the startup like Dropbox, SkyDrive etc.
- I ran some hardware test on HDD (the one in Defraggler) and it gave me a verdict that HDD is in good condition.
- Obviously I ran Anti-spywares(Spybot, Malwarebytes and Super Antispyware) and antivirus (AVG free) and nothing came out that should raise a flag.
- Finally ran CCleaner with CEnhancer to remove hidden crap.
And still there is no significant improvement. I have not tried ReadyBoost to see if it requires more RAM (but I don't think so as when I factory restore, the machine is pretty fast). So I am curious if anyone has any suggestion or want me to run some test and post the results.
Or you think its rather easy to just restore that wreaking head with these issues?
Many thanks in advance.
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Total posts: 3 (Showing page 1 of 1)
It sounds like
by R. Proffitt 
- 5/3/12 12:25 PM
In Reply to: Slowed down machine by Mindstyle06
You don't have a firm grasp on everything running on the machine. The problem of restoring to factory is that the issue will repeat for most folk.
Did you consider looking at what's in say, an advanced tool like HIJACKTHIS and researching each item to see if it's optional or malware?
Is there something new like Spybot you added?
Bob
What I see
by MarkFlax - 5/3/12 1:00 PM
In Reply to: Slowed down machine by Mindstyle06
I see Spybot. Not anything we recommend on today's machines, and especially if its TeaTimer background scanner is turned on. That will surely slow a machine down to a crawl as Spybot fights with the anti-virus to scan 'every file opened'.
Do you have the paid versions of MBAM and SAS? If so, are they also set to run at startup and/or are their background scanners running? If so to either/both of those, disable them! Same reason as Spybot, but at least keep MBAM and SAS to perform manual scans once a week or so.
Defragging is not required.
Why keep so many Startup items if the system takes 5 minutes to startup? I don't know what else you have in the Startup list, but are both Dropbox and SkyDrive attempting to connect to the internet on startup? If so it is reasonable to suggest that startup stalls whilst the system waits for those to complete their internet connection.
Pare down the Startup list to a minimum, and begin again from there.
If both Hibernate and Sleep don't work, don't use them, at least until the system is working better. Don't flog a dead horse, 
Not sure about this, "- It feels like the machine takes rather long time to access any file. You can see that by green bar on the address bar moving slowly. This is not only for the pictures but for any file."
i assume you mean Windows Explorer, and I am willing to bet too many scanners are trying to scan the files.
DO NOT TRY Ready Boost or any other optimizer or registry cleaner utility. They don't work and are likely to make matters worse.
What is CEnhancer? CCleaner is fine as long as you stay away from its registry cleaning options, but that CEnhancer looks suspect to me.
Mark
Total posts: 3 (Showing page 1 of 1)
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