HP Laptop dead slow

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MadEngineer

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#191084 22-Jan-2016 17:17

I have an HP laptop that at first glance is locking up on boot, whereas it's actually on a massive go-slow. Booting into safe mode is about the only way to get it to turn on, but once at the login screen (an hour or so later) it's impossibly slow to operate - the mouse takes 20 seconds or more to move on the screen. Starting windows normally the machine probably boots, but would take an hour. The Windows 7 boot animation with the four colours that spin in together is very slow to animate. I can boot the laptop OK on a Hirens usb stick to XP, however booting to Seagates tools the system quickly becomes inoperable, again displaying things incredibly slow.

The harddrive has tested twice OK - both using the HP built in test functions and also on another PC. I've cloned the drive to another old drive and the laptop is the same on the clone.

I've performed a BIOS update and reset.

The HP recovery function uses windows7, so this also hangs however I booted another laptop with the HP drive on a usb adapter and the recovery function works fine there.

I've tried a reset that you perform by removing the power adapter and the battery and holding down the power button all no good, out of warranty. Any further ideas? The laptop has both intel and amd video.

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#1476975 22-Jan-2016 17:34

Lost track there, slightly confusing post, but have you tried reinstalling from fresh media?

SATTV

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#1476978 22-Jan-2016 17:40

I had this once - it was a faulty power adapter.

The weird thing was it will still charge the battery.

Try removing the PSU and or replacing the PSU.

John

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MadEngineer

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#1477030 22-Jan-2016 18:59

SATTV:
I had this once - it was a faulty power adapter.

The weird thing was it will still charge the battery.

Try removing the PSU and or replacing the PSU.

John

still the same whether on battery only or with battery removed, power only.

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gzt

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#1477035 22-Jan-2016 19:03

Do you have an o/s you can boot from. USB with the HDD unplugged?

It wasn't clear to me if Seagate tools were on USB or not but same applies really.

MadEngineer

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#1477060 22-Jan-2016 20:19

yep it's the same on a windows 7 usb stick. the loading files at the start with the block sized progress bars at the bottom zips through fast enough but as soon as the windows logo appears it chugs almost to a stop. It's like the machine is running at a tiny fraction of the usual clock speed.

a harddrive must be physically in the machine else an annoying hp diagnostics screen comes up

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kiwifidget

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#1477068 22-Jan-2016 20:34

I had a Toshiba laptop that was dead slow to boot up, would actually take a day.

Turned out to be the optical drive wasn't properly seated, there was a screw missing.

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Hammerer

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#1477071 22-Jan-2016 20:45

I'd boot using another OS. Either a WinPE or Linux rescue disk or any Linux distro with a live disk. If you still have a slow boot then you know there is a hardware or firmware problem. If it boots fine then I'd try a clean install of Windows as timmmay suggested.

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gzt

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#1477073 22-Jan-2016 20:53

MadEngineer:
yep it's the same on a windows 7 usb stick. the loading files at the start with the block sized progress bars at the bottom zips through fast enough but as soon as the windows logo appears it chugs almost to a stop. It's like the machine is running at a tiny fraction of the usual clock speed.

a harddrive must be physically in the machine else an annoying hp diagnostics screen comes up

That's annoying. No way to disable in bios?

gzt

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#1477074 22-Jan-2016 20:54

Or set boot order set to USB only?

Never seen that happen I'd expect a disable but never seen it

timmmay

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#1477084 22-Jan-2016 21:19

Mint Linux on a USB stick would be a good test.

MadEngineer

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#1477089 22-Jan-2016 21:28

Hammerer:

I'd boot using another OS. Either a WinPE or Linux rescue disk or any Linux distro with a live disk. If you still have a slow boot then you know there is a hardware or firmware problem. If it boots fine then I'd try a clean install of Windows as timmmay suggested.

yep booting from an ubuntu usb stick is the same ... super slow.

timmmay:

Lost track there, slightly confusing post, but have you tried reinstalling from fresh media?

yeah i could do that but i think it would literally take a life time to complete

gzt:
MadEngineer:

yep it's the same on a windows 7 usb stick. the loading files at the start with the block sized progress bars at the bottom zips through fast enough but as soon as the windows logo appears it chugs almost to a stop. It's like the machine is running at a tiny fraction of the usual clock speed.

a harddrive must be physically in the machine else an annoying hp diagnostics screen comes up

That's annoying. No way to disable in bios?

theres a couple of options regarding what to do on failures during boot, nothing for this. It's not so bad as i've eliminated the drive at least by using a clone.

gzt: Or set boot order set to USB only?

Never seen that happen I'd expect a disable but never seen it

nein

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yitz

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#1477102 22-Jan-2016 21:56

Does it repeatedly stop at a particular line when booting... (iirc you press esc during the animation to show this)

windows 7 boot

Athlonite

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#1477116 22-Jan-2016 22:36

could be overheating and down clocking the CPU this could be from dust blocking the vents or thermal paste needs replacing and or both

1: How old is the Laptop

2: What is the model

3: When is the last time you did a Disk clean and check disk and a full defrag

MadEngineer

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#1477129 22-Jan-2016 23:04

yitz:

Does it repeatedly stop at a particular line when booting... (iirc you press esc during the animation to show this)

the last driver it loads is amdkmpfd.sys

it doesn't stop as such, it just goes impossibly slow

Athlonite:

could be overheating and down clocking the CPU this could be from dust blocking the vents or thermal paste needs replacing and or both

1: How old is the Laptop

2: What is the model

3: When is the last time you did a Disk clean and check disk and a full defrag

the machine is pretty much pristine -- no dust and air flow is good. i agree it's as if there's some throttling but i'm suspecting the video is naff'd as it has no problems with the windows xp version that comes on the hirens image

1: 1 to 2 years old

2: hp probook 470

3: not relevant

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Username1

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#1477135 22-Jan-2016 23:37

I had the exact same problem with my HP laptop a couple of months back. My issue was most likely the hard drive because when I plugged it into an external enclosure it took a while to mount the drives and exploring or copying the data was super slow at like 0.5 to 10 MB/s. But once I deleted about 100GB of my files the hhd started working again normally.

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