Laptop Problems ... Help?
The laptop was new in December 2005, and because I inherited it from my dad, it's a Toshiba laptop fitted with a 1.6 GHz Celeron running Windows XP Home -- yeesh. But it's been a good laptop, just good enough that I never bothered to wipe it with a fresh installation of XP Pro. But now may be the time. Before I go through with that, though, I'm wondering if anyone knows of any tricks to revive XP Home after it suddenly chokes under its own weight, passes out, and barely functions when it comes back to...
Everything was working great Monday morning. I attempted to burn a CD, and the first attempt kicked back an error. I re-inserted the CD (because it hadn't been touched) and tried again, but during this time it decided to slow its processing speed to a crawl, so by my estimation it would have taken an hour just to write the data to the image before burning, and I had to leave for work in about 10, so I had to stop the process.
It didn't like that very much, but I didn't realize it was choking until after I did it.
When I booted up after work, several hours later, it took about 7 minutes to get to the desktop (it had taken about 90 seconds for the last 15 months). My first thought was virus/worm/trojan, but after a few cleanup operations, nothing was found or fixed.
Now it's Tuesday morning, and the touchpad stopped loading for a moment, but I fixed that using my selective startup options... but now wireless connectivity has stopped.
So... I haven't had time to really look yet since I actually go to work during the week, but if anyone has seen something like this before and has any suggestions that might keep the laptop functional long enough for me to extract a few gigabites of data (hopefully in fewer than a couple of hours, rather than several days at current processing speeds). I'll be using KNOPPIX tonight
I hope the hard drive isn't failing, but that seems to be a possibility. I like to think that the combination of Celeron and XP Home means the hard drive is fine, though, and I just need to get my data to another machine as quickly as possible so I can format what's left.
KNOPPIX is next...
Everything was working great Monday morning. I attempted to burn a CD, and the first attempt kicked back an error. I re-inserted the CD (because it hadn't been touched) and tried again, but during this time it decided to slow its processing speed to a crawl, so by my estimation it would have taken an hour just to write the data to the image before burning, and I had to leave for work in about 10, so I had to stop the process.
It didn't like that very much, but I didn't realize it was choking until after I did it.
When I booted up after work, several hours later, it took about 7 minutes to get to the desktop (it had taken about 90 seconds for the last 15 months). My first thought was virus/worm/trojan, but after a few cleanup operations, nothing was found or fixed.
Now it's Tuesday morning, and the touchpad stopped loading for a moment, but I fixed that using my selective startup options... but now wireless connectivity has stopped.
So... I haven't had time to really look yet since I actually go to work during the week, but if anyone has seen something like this before and has any suggestions that might keep the laptop functional long enough for me to extract a few gigabites of data (hopefully in fewer than a couple of hours, rather than several days at current processing speeds). I'll be using KNOPPIX tonight
I hope the hard drive isn't failing, but that seems to be a possibility. I like to think that the combination of Celeron and XP Home means the hard drive is fine, though, and I just need to get my data to another machine as quickly as possible so I can format what's left.
KNOPPIX is next...