Compaq Presario A900 laptop running hot and slow?

[rally]

I have a Compaq Presario a900 laptop. It has a 1.6 ghz intel dual core with 2 gigs of ram and a 160 gb HD.

Lately I have noticed it will run video and other things slow. Its cpu temps are running around 80 C + and often times be 80% of cpu usage. Right now though its in the 30%'s but still running around 80 C with the fan running continously loud.

Does anybody have any ideas?

Thanks

 

[Lexluethar]

Have you cleaned out the laptop with a can of air? Have you done a disk clean, disk derag and disk check?

 

[rally]

Well my plan was to low level format the hard drive and see if the problem goes away. I have an issue though. I cannot get the recovery cd maker program to work it just opens then closes. I have the product key attached on the bottom of my pc for vista. If I get a vista cd and use the product key would that work alright? What am I going to have to do for all my drivers and such? Would those automatically be loaded when I installed Vista?

Thanks

 

[Lexluethar]

You probably have a recovery partition on the laptop unless you've deleted it for some reason.

If you don't have that partition - yes a vista install disk would work and you could use that product key (assuming you have the same version of vista).

Most drivers will be resintalled, but there will be some you will have to hunt for - your best bet would be to get those off of compaq's website. You will also lose all programs that you've installed up to this point and any data that is on the drive.

I still think a good physical cleaning of the system and some system maintenance will help a great deal.

 

[rally]

I have a recovery partition however it won't let me make a recovery CD for whatever reason. (the program crashes) I can do F11 and do a recovery from there, but still no CD. I'd like to have a CD in case anything ever happens. Maybe I can do a recovery then it will let me make a CD?



Thanks.

 

[Lexluethar]

It may, if the OS is corrupt it may not let you make a recovery disk - which i realize you are probably wanting to do so you can restore the OS then recover it. But if the OS is corrupt, and you make a system image you are going to copy over any errors or issues along with it.

Us the recovery partition to bring the system back up.

 

[rally]

What do you mean use the recovery partition to bring the system back up? Isn't this the same thing as hitting F11?

Thanks!

 

[Lexluethar]

Yes, that is a recovery partition that you are accessing. It has installation files from the manufacturer that will put your system back into the same state it was when it left the factory.