Dad's laptop acting up - random restarts, extremely slow, etc.

ixfd64 · 09 Jan 2014

Hello everyone, I think I may need your expertise again.

My father has Windows 7 Ultimate on an HP Pavilion laptop. It has always been kind of slow because he has a huge amount of files, but it started having serious problems a few days ago. The issues are:

1. The laptop randomly restarts on its own. I checked for viruses but could not find anything. I also checked the health of the hard drive, which seems perfectly fine. The event log shows that the system was "unexpectedly" restarted, but nothing else.

2. After restarting, the computer is sometimes unable to find a boot device. Again, an examination of the hard drive showed no problems.

3. The DVD drive is sometimes unable read any discs.

4. Certain actions that should take just sections (such as opening the advanced system settings) take an extremely long time.

5. I sometimes get a pop-up saying a script is running slowly, even when no browser is not run.

Anyone have an idea what could be the cause?

badger906 · 10 Jan 2014

one of 2 things springs to mind 1) the hard drive is on its way out, despite tests saying otherwise it could still be.
so try and back everything up incase

2) there maybe a ram issue, download and run memtest if it crashes almost instantly youve narrowed it down.

Fantail · 10 Jan 2014

I agree with badger906. He could also run-sch. a checkdsk for next boot.

whs · 10 Jan 2014

For a test, run a live CD and see whether that works OK. If yes, it is most likely your disk that is at fault.

If you have no live CD on hand, download this .iso from my Skydrive, burn it to CD and boot with that CD. The .iso is the WinPE CD for free Macrium. You can also use it to make images and recover from images. Here is how:

Imaging with free Macrium

ProstarComputer · 10 Jan 2014

Agreed that it could be the drive and/or memory (more likely the drive). A lot of those benching/health utilities for disk drives report SMART status, read + write speeds, and perhaps magnetic integrity (damaged or corrupt sectors), but they cannot tell if there is a more pressing mechanical problem.

You can try other testing utilities if you like. HD Sentinel and CrystalDiskInfo for hard drives are useful applications. MemTest86+ is handy for testing memory, but make sure you let it run for several hours.

ixfd64 · 10 Jan 2014

Thanks for the replies, everyone.

For the record, I just got a blue screen with error KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR. From what I gather, that usually is caused by a hard drive issue. It's a good thing everything on there has already been backed up.