Computer Help - wierd probrlem.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Alright, so here's the situtation.

I'm playing WoW on my laptop (2ghz AMD 64 bit Turion, 1 gig ram) with winamp playing in the background. Been doing this fine for roughly a year now. All the sudden winamp starts mad stuttering while WoW is still playing fine. I alt-tab out. Winamp starts playing fine again.

I reboot, windows is taking a fuck long time to start up (up to like 1 minute or so from a normal 3 second boot). I ran a chkdsk /r from console and rebooted and it took like roughly 15 hours to do the file verification task. Running McAfee (enterprise 8.0) system scan took something like 3 hours too (normally around 20~30 minutes). Was no spyware/virus detected.

The wierd thing is I'm playing WoW on it right now, no visual lag no nothing, runniing as flawlessly as ever. It's like whatever process I'm doing is taking 90+% CPU utilization or something and preventing the CPU from doing other tasks.

Before I break down and try reformatting or calling technical support, was hoping someone had seen something like this before and coud help.

Thanks.

[mattsb84]

You can try getting a nice little program called enditall.

Run that after booting your PC up. It will kill any non-essential programs/processes runnings. Boot up WOW/win amp, see if the issue starts again.

[Veng]

Did you recently install a new ATA Hard Drive by any chance? I had a similar problem over break, and it was caused by me using a channel select IDE cable and not having the jumpers set to channel select .

[Zehn - Vhex]

No new hardware. I did just run the latest XP update. Thinking I'll try uninstalling that.

I've tried disabeling indexing services (found some site on google that recommended that as cvisc.exe was chugging up 90% of my CPU when I would just let the computer idle with nothing running). That didn't fix the issue.

I also have my priorities all set to normal.

[Icedtea]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

No new hardware. I did just run the latest XP update. Thinking I'll try uninstalling that.

I've tried disabeling indexing services (found some site on google that recommended that as cvisc.exe was chugging up 90% of my CPU when I would just let the computer idle with nothing running). That didn't fix the issue.

I also have my priorities all set to normal.

I just ran the windows update a couple days ago and my computer has no been randomly freezing for no reason. Might just be coincidence though.

[kedwyn]

Maybe see if your power settings got changed. I'm wondering if your laptop is forcing system speed down for battery conservation or something stupid like that even if you are plugged into the juice.

Odd system issue.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Uninstalled the windows update, didn't fix it.
Tried that enditall program, didn't fix it.
Checked power settings, didn't fix it.

To give a bit more info, everytime I switch continents in WoW, it takes an abnormal amount of time to load.

I'm just wondering if my RAM isn't going bad or something and it's taking longer to load/unload things. Anybody know of any (preferably free) tools that allow you to check your RAM? 8/

And, if for some reason that is the problem, how hard is it to replace laptop RAM?

Thanks again in advance guys.

[Vinen]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

Uninstalled the windows update, didn't fix it.
Tried that enditall program, didn't fix it.
Checked power settings, didn't fix it.

To give a bit more info, everytime I switch continents in WoW, it takes an abnormal amount of time to load.

I'm just wondering if my RAM isn't going bad or something and it's taking longer to load/unload things. Anybody know of any (preferably free) tools that allow you to check your RAM? 8/

And, if for some reason that is the problem, how hard is it to replace laptop RAM?

Thanks again in advance guys.

Depends on the laptop, sometimes easy... sometimes a pain in the ass depending on the manufacturer of the laptop... on my dell it was a joke to replace the ram.

[Vorph]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

I'm just wondering if my RAM isn't going bad or something and it's taking longer to load/unload things. Anybody know of any (preferably free) tools that allow you to check your RAM? 8/

And, if for some reason that is the problem, how hard is it to replace laptop RAM?

Thanks again in advance guys.

Sounds more like a dying HD to me, but...

Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool

Get one of the iso versions and burn it to a cd to boot from on your laptop. A RAM problem that you can actually see affect Windows should bomb out of Memtest86+ almost immediately, but I'd let it run at least one full set of all the tests anyway.

If the RAM is ok, you can get Prime95 and torture test the CPU too. (Although a fail doesn't necessarily mean that it was the CPU--torture test is normally used when you have a system you know is stable and then overclock CPU/RAM before running it. In your case it would just be a confirmation that something is seriously wrong.)
Torture test your CPU with Prime95

[Zehn - Vhex]

Are laptops harddrives relatively easy to replace?

[Vinen]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

Are laptops harddrives relatively easy to replace?

See my answer to memory.

[Vorph]

I've seen a few with RAM that wasn't easy to get at, but I've never seen a laptop where the HD wasn't trivial to replace.

[Zehn - Vhex]

So...

After I realized it was going to take roughly 9 days to backup all the data I had on my laptop, I decided to chuck it all to the wind and ran system restore to a restore point I had set last november and it fixed the problem.

I have no goddamn clue what I might have somehow accidentally installed in that time. I've been doing system updates but that's about it.

Thanks all for the help though guys. It's good to know that upgrading/replacing parts on a laptop aren't as horrible as I thought.

edit: For the record, I hate when I spend a week checking and trying the most obscure shit I can think of. I should really learn to do all the basic troubleshooting steps first.