FujitsuAmilo XI1526 Laptop VERY slow - disc light flashes continuously

Hi everyone

Sorry but my first post is a request for help

My dear old laptop 80% of the time is so slow it's basically unuseable. When it is running slow the disc light is continually flashing. This can happen from startup and after a while the disck light will go off and the laptop will be ok for a while until the disc light starts again. I'm using chrome and as far as I can tell the problem is not affected by what load I'm placing on the machine.

I recently had a fresh install of Win7 Ultimate and as far as I know it's fully up to date. Previously it was running Vista and had the same problem - I was hoping the win7 install would sort it out.

One thing that puzzles me (but may mean nothing!) is that when I look at the disc device properties it lists -
capacity 14472mb
unallocated space 1mb
but the disc has 78.3gb free space.

I've checked that the disc drivers are up to date and not sure what to check for next.

I'd really appreciate some help and thanks in advance.

Cheers.

Hi - Thanks for the reply the screen dump of the disc management window should be attached to this post. It was taken when the laptop was running reasonably well.

Re the 1GB memory - that's another problem I have - I have another 1GB and as far as I can tell it's identical to the one installed. But when ever I try to install the second memory pcb the laptop just cycles round never starting but it will start happily with either of the memory pcb's loaded.#


Thanks

Thanks for the follow up answer bigmck.

I do understand what you're saying but I still don't understand why sometimes it runs perfectly acceptably but others (ie 80%) the disc light is hammering away and the thing is so slow it's painful.

If what you are saying is right wouldn't it be slow all the time?

Maybe I need to attempt to have a look at the disc managment when it's running slow?

Cheers.

One thing about Notebooks/Laptops is their power management. I've had to set the Power Options to either Desktop or Always On even when on battery power to keep them from throttling down the CPU speed to about half it maximum, one was a 1.8GHz but throttled down to 573MHz, quite slow. Of course that shortens the duration of battery charge when not plugged in to AC power. Sometimes after running on battery only Windows doesn't properly recognized when on AC power and doesn't get the CPU speed set accordingly.

Hi again and thanks for taking the time to reply.

Believe it or not the laptop is working pretty much as well as I can expect given it's age etc. I very much doubt it but could using the disc management program have made any difference as it's the only thing I have done. I'l load the speccy program as these laptops are renowned for running hot, it'll be interesting to see if high temps coincide with it slowing down.

Re power management problems here's a unrelated tale. A while back I was running the laptop with totally dead battery - if the power cord came out it would die with out any hesitation. An anoying thing at this time was that the wifi would randomly stop, sometimes after 5 mins sometimes after 40 and the only way to get t back was to re-boot, After I got a new battery the wifi has never gone off!! it seems the laptop was sacrificing power to the wifi to keep other stuff going.

Cheers