Wife dropped her laptop...

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ImLuhkee

ImLuhkee

CAGiversary!
Well to sum it up Wife dropped her laptop last night, and now her computer is unbearably slow. Browsers, Outlook, Explorer, everything takes 4+ minutes to load anything. She went to her restore points and tried to load one but Windows said it didn't work and now all of the restore points are missing. She is trying to backup her files now but as I mentioned the computer is incredibly slow so it would take a while before we could even attempt re-installing Windows. Any suggestions that I could try before I re-install windows?

System Specs
Dell 15" Laptop
Windows Vista 32 bit
Pentium Dual Core
3Gb of Ram
250gb HDD
 
99% chance its hardware and not software. Just dropping a laptop wont somehow mess up the software and make it run slow.

Could be it dislodged a stick of ram and now your running at half of what it was.

Head might have been damaged in the hard drive and now its seek time is F'd. Find out who the manufacturer of the drive is and go to their website, they should have a diagnostic tool you can to check your drives integerity.
 
I'd wager a guess that the hard drive's read/write head got screwed in the drop, causing slow read/write speeds. I do know that laptops have drop sensors built in to stop laptops R/D heads in place so they don't damage data on the hard disks. Recently happened to a client of where I work, but he wouldn't say what happened to the laptop. However I'd wager he dropped it. He was under warranty so I was able to get a replacement sent out and just transferred data with Windows Easy Transfer (I can't remember if Vista has it or not). Was pretty easy and straight forward.

You can try a disk check (Start -> Computer -> Right click drive and select Properties -> Tools -> Error Checking -> Reboot PC and let it run) or you can run hard drive diagnostics. However these could take a while to finish (sometimes days depending how bad it is) if the hard drive's R/W head is busted and not functioning properly. They may be built in to the boot menu you can often access by hitting F12 or F2 during boot. Otherwise you'll want to find the laptop manufacturer disks that came with it which will often have what you need on them for diagnostics.


However, like gargus said something may have jarred out of place. It doesn't hurt to re-plug anything on the laptop you can.
 
Thanks guys, I will look into both of those options and let you know what I find.

It did have a extended warranty until march of this year.:roll:
 
You could always hit her with it, and see if it fixes whatever came lose.

If anything, it'll teach your wife to be more careful with these things.
 
Reseating (physically removing and then immediately reinstalling) the RAM (as mentioned) isn't a bad idea. Probably not a bad idea to do it for every component that's not too hard to do (RAM, optical drive, hard drive, wireless card). There's really no excuse not to try these since they are pretty easy.

Also a damaged hard drive is quite possible. Do you have a USB drive adapter/enclosure that you can use to mount the drive as a data drive on some other machine? That would eliminate other hardware as the cause of the slowdown.

If you really want to get into it, you can go to ultimatebootcd.com and make yourself an ultimatebootcd, boot from that CD, and then use the one of the included HDD diagnostics (I recommend MHDD32) to check the drive.
 
To further clairify my suggestion of running the hard drives diagnostic you need to go to your start menu, right click "computer", click on "properties", click on "device manager", click on "disk drives" and it may or may not tell you who the manufactuer is but it should atleast give you the model number of the drive a quick google search of will tell you who made it.

When you find out who makes it you can post here and Ill find the right one you need to download or shoot me a PM. Actually shoot me a PM if you like, so I dont miss it.

If the drive is bad (which Im guessing is the ultimate problem here) and its under warranty you can easily and for the cost of shipping one way most of them time get them to replace it for you.
 
One time my gf walked up the stairs with the laptop I helped her to get to show me something. I almost killed her as she brought it upstairs with the screen open :O.

When it comes to tech, I'd rather deal with it myself.
 
Thanks again everyone for all the advice. I did check the RAM and HDD and put them back in. Didn't fix it. I am now trying to run the Western Digital "Lifeguard" Diagnostic tool. It passed the "quick test" but I just started the extended test and it went about 5 minutes and now is saying it has bad sector. Error Code 08 Handling Failure. I am guessing that mean the harddrive is bad?

EDIT: Also the WD Diagnostic tool was unable to repair bad sectors.

EDIT #2: We took one more attempt at removing the HDD and blew air into the hard drive compartment, put the hard drive back in. Now the computer is working perfectly(well at least as well as it was before) again. The wife is happy again. I appreciate all of CAGs help. THANKS!
 
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