redfish
Intelligent Metalhead
- Messages
- 345
- Location
- North Shore Massachusetts
Hi everybody, my dad's laptop recently started acting up and I cannot find the problem. He tells me that he opened a file one of his chinese cousins sent him and that's approximately the time when it started malfunctioning. The first and most obvious symptom was that the text would randomly and suddenly switch to what looks like an asian character system while he was typing, and there was no way to reverse it. What I noticed was that the machine started to run veeery, veeeeeeery slowly. It's a new(ish), fast i5 computer and we don't use it for gaming or anything, so it shouldn't be running this slowly. It used to run quite well. If I open up perfmon the CPU usage is at a low normal level, and so is the pagefile usage. I re-ran windows experience assessment to try and check if it was a hardware problem, and everything turned up normal. Whenever we try and run a virus check, it will become stuck and freeze on a certain language.dll file in the programs(x86) folder. I can't figure out what's causing this malfunction.
I posted this in the hardware section because a) I didn't know where else to put it, it's not necessarily a windows error nor a virus. and b) I suspect that it may be a hard drive problem.
Occasionally, when the hard drive starts spinning, it'll make either a rumble noise or a noise like something getting caught in a fan. A few days ago it did the latter, and dad thought it was a foreign object caught in the CPU fan. There's no way this is true, as if an object was caught in the CPU fan for that long (several minutes) it would overheat and shut down. That left the only other moving part in the machine, the hard drive.
Any help? Any suggestions? Any clues as to what is causing this?
I posted this in the hardware section because a) I didn't know where else to put it, it's not necessarily a windows error nor a virus. and b) I suspect that it may be a hard drive problem.
Occasionally, when the hard drive starts spinning, it'll make either a rumble noise or a noise like something getting caught in a fan. A few days ago it did the latter, and dad thought it was a foreign object caught in the CPU fan. There's no way this is true, as if an object was caught in the CPU fan for that long (several minutes) it would overheat and shut down. That left the only other moving part in the machine, the hard drive.
Any help? Any suggestions? Any clues as to what is causing this?