I spent about 4 hours trying to repair this laptop. The customer brought in Toshiba Satellite 1415 notebook with the following problem: Laptop runs very slow, sometimes locks up. When playing DVD movie, the video output is choppy and freezes up. He reloaded Windows XP from a restore CD but it didn’t help.
We see these kinds of laptops every day and this one didn’t look scary from the beginning. As I always do, I started the laptop waiting for the problem to occur. The laptop booted to Windows fine but much slower than an average unit. During the boot process I was listening for an unusual sound from the hard drive. It was a little bit loud; but nothing critical like a grinding sound. After the notebook booted to Windows, I tried to play a DVD movie and it took me more then 2 minutes to open WinDVD player software. It took one more minute to start playing a DVD movie. The video and the audio output were choppy. Replacing the DVD drive didn’t help. I was blaming the hard drive and started testing it with Hitachi Drive Fitness Test but it didn’t fail. Just in case I installed a test hard drive and reloaded the original factory software. Same problem occurred right after I rebooted the laptop. I tested the memory with Memtest 86+ test. It took me over 2.5 hours to test 512MB of memory but it didn’t fail the test. Usually this test runs much faster. Just in case, to make sure that the memory is not a culprit I swapped both memory sticks with a good known test memory but it didn’t fix the problem. After I excluded the hard drive and the memory I guessed that overheating was a problem because the laptop was running hot. If a laptop runs slow, I always check if the CPU heatsink is clogged with dust and lint. In this case cleaning up the heatsink, regreasing the CPU and reflashing the BIOS to the latest version didn’t help either. OK, I tried all easy stuff, now it’s time for hardcore. I started removing parts one by one trying to narrow down the problem. I removed the modem card, wireless card, DVD drive and left only the system board, the CPU, a good know hard drive with a fresh Windows load and a good known memory stick. The laptop still was running slow. After 4 hours I gave up. After I excluded almost every possible part, it must be a bad system board or a bad CPU. Replacing any of these parts wouldn’t make any sense because it would be more expensive than eBay price for a similar working laptop. I called to the customer and explained the situation and he just declined repair.
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February 15th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
Sounds like my 2.5 year old Satellite 1415 S105. Ultra slow boot-ups, freeze-ups that required cold shut-downs, considerable noise. The kicker: two months ago it just refused to start. Period. Best guess from knowlegable friend who looked at it was a problem “somewhere” in the system board.
No more Toshibas.
February 17th, 2006 at 1:08 pm
My Toshiba Satellite A70 is the same way… extremely slow boot up and just takes forever to do just about anything. I concur no more Toshiba’s for me
February 17th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
Hi Terry, it’s not just Toshiba laptop; it might happen with any laptop. If your laptop boots slow, I would check the hard drive first. Do you hear any strange sounds like clicking, grinding, etc. from the hard drive? You can use Hitachi Drive Fitness Test to test your hard drive. If the hard drive fails the test, install a new hard drive and run a restore CD. You’ll see the difference. Also it’s possible that the laptop overheats and the CPU runs slower causing the laptop to slow down. Check if the heatsink is clogged with lint and dust.
March 17th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
Same problem here with a centrino sony vaio. Slow with everything: windows, linux live cds, even in bios. Ram, drive ok. Don’t have a clue about the cause, I too will advice my client to sent it for repairs or dump it.
April 13th, 2006 at 8:41 am
I recently read on-line that a P4 processor has a feature called temperature throttling, which allows it to run more slowly when it overheats. Earlier processors would just shut down or reboot the PC if they overheated. I’m currently troubleshooting a Gateway notebook that runs very slowly at times. I’ve been monitoring the CPU temperature with a free utility but haven’t been able to find anything yet that will monitor the CPU fan. I’ve upgraded to the latest BIOS and checked BIOS to see if it reports FAN health, but no such luck. Any ideas?
April 13th, 2006 at 6:29 pm
Hi Erin,
I noticed that when CPU overheats the entire system slows down. With your Gateway notebook I would try to install a test hard drive and load Windows OS for testing. It might be hardware related issue as well as software related issue. By loading a fresh Windows OS you will eliminate the software.
By the way, check out Notebook Hardware Control utility. I found this utility today and haven’t tried it myself yet, but it looks pretty interesting.
September 13th, 2006 at 2:23 am
I saw this because I have a similar problem with a Toshiba Satellite 1800-series. Being client- rather than warranty-orientated, I have not wiped and re-done the XP installation, but find similar results.
Does your slowdown affect MemTest86 or other out-of-OS processes? If so, then that points away from malware, HD DMA mode, paging performance and drivers.
You’d be left with disabled L1/L2 cache, CPU throttling, and anything that spams the hardware with interrupt requests (tho the latter will usually crash).
Hard drives slow down when they fail, due to attempts to retry access and/or relocate failing sectors. When this happens, the HD activity LED will be hard on, mouse pointer will stick, and keystrokes will be ignored.
RAM crashes at full speed …any attempts to error-check RAM (i.e. CRC, or parity) don’t trigger a retry, but halt the system as soon as an error is detected.
Does MemTest86 show a mismatch between speeds expected for L1, L2 and RAM?
OTOH, if out-of-OS speed is full, does the performance hit go away if networking is disabled, peripherals are disconnected, or in VGA, MSConfig-suppression or Safe modes?
In my case, the slowdown starts after a while, and while the mouse movement stays brisk and smooth and Caps Lock LED response is prompt and appropriate, everything else is delayed to the point of torpor. Then the slowdown ends and everything that was queued to happen, happens at once – so needless to say, I never spot anything hogging CPU in Task manager.
BTW, if you can see Task Manager during slowdown (and it is being updated) then 90%+ idle would point away from CPU towards waiting for some other hardware condition.
October 17th, 2006 at 6:10 am
Chris Quirke,
I am having the same issues with my Gateway P4 2.8Ghz HT laptop with 1GB DDRAM. It has begun recently to boot very slowly and the same freezing with the HD light solid on and task manager showing no “CPU” hogging. It then “catches up” all at once like your example. I am going to run the Hitachi Drive Tst on it tonight and see if the drive passes. I do have 90%+ idle when the Task manager finally shows up. At first when this happened I was not able to run Symantec’s virus scan, System restore or get to the internet through IE. I somehow got it to access the internet again but it is running in spurts. Any ideas? Sounds to me that either my HD is going bad or laptop is toast.
October 18th, 2006 at 9:02 pm
Joe,
When your laptop freezes up listen in the area of the hard drive. Can you hear a repetitive clicking sound? If yes, then you might have a bad hard drive. Test it with Hitachi drive fitness test (advanced test), this utility is pretty accurate.
October 19th, 2006 at 4:25 am
No clicking or unusual sounds from hd except that it is spinning much longer to do anything than it used to. I couldn’t get the Hitachi Drive Test CD boot image to work so I used a Seagate one and it gave me a “File Structure” error. I am thinking time to pony up for a new hd.
October 20th, 2006 at 8:58 am
Joe,
Before you buy a new hard drive, try reinstalling the operating system on the existing drive. It can help. Backup all personal data and run a restore CD.
February 22nd, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Uhh, before swapping and disassembly, why not run diagnostic software on the motherboard, processor, and stuff?
March 1st, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Long shot but sounds like an interupt issue. Make sure they haven’t shorted any of the USB pins.
April 24th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
I have a Toshiba Satellite 1415-S173 that’s about 3-4 years old, and had been running pretty slow for a while, too, and making a lot of noise on startup. For a while it was shutting down suddenly, telling me my battery was low even if the AC adapter was plugged in. This morning the left 2 LED power lights were on (green and orange respectively from left), but the laptop wouldn’t power on at all. After holding down the power button, both lights went off and now it won’t turn on at all (either with or without the battery, plugged into AC). I thought the battery was dead, but not sure if that’s the case since it doesn’t worked plugged in either (I’ve tried several outlets). I would appreciate any input. Thanks!!
April 24th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
Erin,
From the description it’s hard to guess what is wrong.
What kind of noise? Like a bad fan or some kind of clicking sounds (probably bad hard drive)?
Looks like a problem with the power jack I described here.
I would test the memory module first. Find a known good memory stick and install it instead of yours. Test the laptop. Try reseating the RAM module, move it from one slot to another.
December 28th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
I have a Toshiba satellite 1415 which I mainly us for internet access. last week it started to make a very faint noise when I started the windows and then I noticed the laptop work very slow. I reinstalled the recovery CDs several times, didn’t help. even installing the full version of XP pro didn’t help neither. I thought that because of the noise it should be a mechanical problem most likely related to Hard. I tested the Hard and it was OK. I read your article that overheating and dirty fan may cause that, therefore I tried to open the hard case and clean the fan but I couldn’t (probably I was missing a screw which I couldn’t see) but I could open the shell half way. I closed it again and VOLLA!!! it start working fast again. My best guess, probably my 2 years old had stepped on my laptop and somehow the compressed keybord was pushing on the hard drive and made it noisy and slow. Thought that I wanted to share my experience with others too.
Good Luck.
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:32 pm
u shold’ve gave the computer a virus check by usinng avg free and tried to check for viruses by using one of their virus removal tools. it worked a miracle for me because my pc was really slow before and after i done a virus cleanout boy my system was flying!
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:40 pm
mrz2008,
Reinstalling factory software from scratch eliminates any software/virus related problems. If you reinstall the operating system but the computer is still slow, it’s not software/virus/spyware related issue.
May 8th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Remove Laptop battery and see if this improves performance. Old smart batteries sometimes have the controller fail, causing the sytem to consistently try and “poll” a non-responsive smart battery.
January 14th, 2009 at 11:22 am
hey looks like the cpu is bust … u did not mention swappin for another one
February 28th, 2009 at 1:49 am
Have just seen the comments about the battery. I have just removed my battery from my Saterllite Pro A120 and found the machine to run back at normal speed. I bought a new battery last year and at first the battery life was up to 4 hours, now it’s around 1.5 hours life on full charge and the machine runns slow. So I’m going to invest in a Duracell replacement battery this time and see if this makes any difference. Does anyone think this is just a battery problem or could ther be a fault with the laptop ?
June 20th, 2009 at 8:09 am
I have a Toshiba Satellite lap top, series 1415, Model # PS141U-01F. I know I need to add memory and I need a new battery but I can not locate this computer any where online. It does not exist. I do not have a book. Can not find nubers on the computer. The installation CD’s give the series #. The model # is on the receipt from Best Buy. I am ay a total loss. Mine is running very slow also. Due to memory I assume.
Can anyone help me with this dilemma.
Thank you.