Laptop runs extremely slow........

[lancefiles]

I have several Laptops in my house hold and recently pulled out my Latitude C640 it has a 20 gig hard drive and 512 (256x2) in ram. I just put in the 20 gig hard drive since I also have several of them laying around, I re installed windows so i could have afresh start on the laptop but it appears to run extremely slow, it takes a while just to get to the desktop I downloaded all the updates from windows update and it stii runs slow, I haven't installed any software not even an anti virus yet, and haven't added any hardware but it still runs real slow any idea why it is doing that or any suggestions how to remedy this???

[pam123]

Have you installed the basic drivers it needs from the Dell site ?

[lancefiles]

Originally Posted by pam123 Have you installed the basic drivers it needs from the Dell site ?

Yes . all the drivers that werent installed from windows Xp I got from the dell site

[EzyStvy]

Look in Device Manager->IDE Controller properties->Primary properties->Advanced Settings->Is the transfer mpode DMA or PIO? (it should be dma)

[liambl]

Did the problem start directly after installation? You mention not having an AV but you have been to the WU and Dell sites, you may have gotten some malware.

[lancefiles]

Originally Posted by liambl Did the problem start directly after installation? You mention not having an AV but you have been to the WU and Dell sites, you may have gotten some malware.

well yeah it started right after installation but the installation was going slow too, after it installed the first boot seemed to take forever to get to the desktop..

[lancefiles]

Originally Posted by EzyStvy Look in Device Manager->IDE Controller properties->Primary properties->Advanced Settings->Is the transfer mpode DMA or PIO? (it should be dma)

Yeah The transfer mode is on DMA if available............

[pam123]

Originally Posted by lancefiles well yeah it started right after installation but the installation was going slow too, after it installed the first boot seemed to take forever to get to the desktop..

That sounds like the laptop is loading more than it needs to.
So you partitioned and formatted and you chose the special notebook/laptop install option ...

And then you did what ... ?

We're back tracking and not too sure what happened here, so we're doing the software before you swap out hardware ( wouldn't hope to double check the hdd connection though and look at bios settings.).

[lancefiles]

well I figured out the problem had to be my harddrive since I took the one out of my Latitude C400 and put it in there and it worked fine ( I wanted to burn some disk and the C640 has the burner on it) but with that being said any suggestions on something I can do to the hard drive to remedy that?

[EzyStvy]

Not sure why you think the drive is the issue? Course, the hard drive is probably a 4200 rpm drive...

Wondering if maybe the CPU thinks the machine is running off battery - so the cpu is running at half speed...

[pam123]

If switching hard drives works, the first question would be what's the difference, if any between the one you pulled out of your C400 and the one you had in the C640 .
Is it possible that the first drive was the wrong model for that laptop or differed in another way as EzyStvy has suggested ?

[lancefiles]

Originally Posted by EzyStvy Not sure why you think the drive is the issue? Course, the hard drive is probably a 4200 rpm drive... Wondering if maybe the CPU thinks the machine is running off battery - so the cpu is running at half speed...

I think the hard drive is the issue because when I put in the other harddrive it runs as fast as it should and when I put back in the old harddrive its slow again..................

[lancefiles]

Originally Posted by pam123 If switching hard drives works, the first question would be what's the difference, if any between the one you pulled out of your C400 and the one you had in the C640 . Is it possible that the first drive was the wrong model for that laptop or differed in another way as EzyStvy has suggested ?

well they are made by the same company (Western Digital) just one is an 80 gig and the other is 20 gig..............................................and I didnt know it was possible to have the wrong model. I figured if it went in and came on it worked.......