Last week our brand new Dell workstation laptop (Precision M6500), became nearly unusable - very long lags when typing, rolling mouse over menu options, waiting for programs to load, waiting for menu options to activate, etc. There are moments of clarity, where the computer will behave normally, but these don't last more than a few minutes.
The problem corresponds with some hard crashes that we experienced -- we had been running some fairly intense renderings that day. Just to note, our old XP workstations with slower graphics cards, less RAM and slower processors, cannot run these renderings. We are not sure if the problem is related to these crashes, because it is possible that there was a "boiling of the frog" here, where perhaps the computer was gradually slowing down, finally reaching a tipping point where we just noticed last week.
I discovered the "Resource Monitor" and from that I think the problem is Disk Related because the disk is writing all the time (blue LED on front also goes solid quite frequently when computer is idle.) Also, the graph that shows disk queue length scales up to 5, 10, and 50 regularly. This is true even when running in Safe Mode with networking off. Both the blue and green lines on all disk graphs spike all over the place, again, while idle and while in use.
Here are the things that we have tried:
Clean reload of Nvidea graphics card driver
Updated and ran full scans with our Norton Anti-Virus
Used the "optimize performance" option in Norton
Defragged
Turned off automatic defragging
Ran Disk Check (no problem.)
Turned off Prefetch, ReadyBoot and Superfetch
Uninstalled unnecessary software
Uninstalled some necessary software, such as Norton and Adobe Suite 5.0
Called Dell, and ran their hardware diagnostics while on the phone (again no problem)
Next I am going to run a check of the operating system with the install disk, and if that doesn't work, I'll reload Windows 7. Before I do that, thought, I was wondering if anyone here had any other ideas? One thing I read somewhere was that someone had found their computer was writing millions of errors somewhere in an infinite loop. Once they found that and reset the program that writes the error message, problem solved. That sounds like a potential culprit, where our hard crashes maybe could have set something like that off. I don't know how to look for that, though.
One other note - when we ran the Norton optimize option, I had the performance monitor going, and the graphs started to look "normal" to my eye. The computer seemed fixed after, but it only lasted about 5 or 10 minutes.
Thanks for any help!
Wendie
The problem corresponds with some hard crashes that we experienced -- we had been running some fairly intense renderings that day. Just to note, our old XP workstations with slower graphics cards, less RAM and slower processors, cannot run these renderings. We are not sure if the problem is related to these crashes, because it is possible that there was a "boiling of the frog" here, where perhaps the computer was gradually slowing down, finally reaching a tipping point where we just noticed last week.
I discovered the "Resource Monitor" and from that I think the problem is Disk Related because the disk is writing all the time (blue LED on front also goes solid quite frequently when computer is idle.) Also, the graph that shows disk queue length scales up to 5, 10, and 50 regularly. This is true even when running in Safe Mode with networking off. Both the blue and green lines on all disk graphs spike all over the place, again, while idle and while in use.
Here are the things that we have tried:
Clean reload of Nvidea graphics card driver
Updated and ran full scans with our Norton Anti-Virus
Used the "optimize performance" option in Norton
Defragged
Turned off automatic defragging
Ran Disk Check (no problem.)
Turned off Prefetch, ReadyBoot and Superfetch
Uninstalled unnecessary software
Uninstalled some necessary software, such as Norton and Adobe Suite 5.0
Called Dell, and ran their hardware diagnostics while on the phone (again no problem)
Next I am going to run a check of the operating system with the install disk, and if that doesn't work, I'll reload Windows 7. Before I do that, thought, I was wondering if anyone here had any other ideas? One thing I read somewhere was that someone had found their computer was writing millions of errors somewhere in an infinite loop. Once they found that and reset the program that writes the error message, problem solved. That sounds like a potential culprit, where our hard crashes maybe could have set something like that off. I don't know how to look for that, though.
One other note - when we ran the Norton optimize option, I had the performance monitor going, and the graphs started to look "normal" to my eye. The computer seemed fixed after, but it only lasted about 5 or 10 minutes.
Thanks for any help!
Wendie
