TROUBLESHOOTING DELL XPS M1330

[RoadrunnerNBiggs]

Hello all! I have come here to ask for your assistance! I have a friend who dropped her Dell XPS m1330 laptop and I asked if I can have a look to help her find out what the problem was (I'm trying to learn how to troubleshoot PCs so I thought this would help).


The laptop boots REALLY slow (took an hour), so I booted in safe mode and disabled all the startup items so it will boot faster. Rebooted it again in normal mode and it is indeed faster, but operating the system is not as fast as I want it to be. I deleted some programs that I deemed were unimportant and took up space on her memory. Still slow.

I need to know why her PC is slow and what measures I can take to make it faster. I've figured out some issues that may be important to know:

1. It says her battery is undetected. The battery must be charged for the PC to run, so I am guessing she needs her battery replaced. But will this make a difference on the speed of her computer?

2. She had her hard drive replaced before, but she didn't ever screw her hard drive in to secure it. Will this be a problem since she dropped her laptop and her hard drive has moving parts? How would I know if it is indeed the hard drive?

3. Her OS(C drive has 126GB free of 280GB. Her Recovery(D drive has 9.27GB free of 14.9GB. Do you think this is enough space?

Thank you!

 

[Thorax_the_Impaler]

What OS is it running and what are the specs? Ultimately that will determine whether or not you can improve its performance. A new battery would not speed it up.

Poor maintenance of hardware can damage it. Forget to secure a bolt in a car and you could have a serious problem.

Not properly securing the hard drive = Bad idea.

Her storage looks fine. If she is a basic user I doubt she would fill that drive. Speaking of, did you defragment it?

 

[Trotter]

Run CHKDSK on it. Once it is booted up, open Computer, right click on C: drive, click Properties, click the Tools tab, under Error-checking click "Check now...", check both boxes ("Automatically fix file errors" and "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors"), hit Start.

It will tell you that the drive is in use so tell it to run it on next boot, then restart. It will take a while but once it is finished it will boot up.

 

[Yevrag35]

I agree with Thorax and Trotter. The hard drive is most likely the culprit to her poor performance.

 

[RoadrunnerNBiggs]

I appreciate all your responses. Thank you! Yes, I have defragmented the hard disk as well as checked it--there were no issues with it, it said the volume was clean. It's running on Windows Vista. I don't know what else the issue can be?

 

[Yevrag35]

I appreciate all your responses. Thank you! Yes, I have defragmented the hard disk as well as checked it--there were no issues with it, it said the volume was clean. It's running on Windows Vista. I don't know what else the issue can be?

If the hard drive's failing, there may not be any warning signs except for slowing read and write times.

You may want to check the health of it with a hard drive diagnostic tool like this one: SeaTools | Seagate

You load the tool onto a CD/DVD/USB flash drive, and boot into it instead of Windows. Then let it do its work.

 

[RoadrunnerNBiggs]

Here are the specs:

DELL XPS M1330
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T6400 @ 2.00GHz
Memory RAM: 3GB
System: 32-bit OS

Dell XPS M1330 Specs - Laptops - CNET Reviews

 

[RoadrunnerNBiggs]

I will try this out. Thank you for the help!

 

[RoadrunnerNBiggs]

I've taken your advice and used SeaTools and confirmed that the hard drive was the culprit! Time for a new hard drive! Thank you all for your quick and knowledgeable responses--appreciate it!

 

[Yevrag35]

I've taken your advice and used SeaTools and confirmed that the hard drive was the culprit! Time for a new hard drive! Thank you all for your quick and knowledgeable responses--appreciate it!

Figured as much. The hard drive is always going to be the most unreliable and vulnerable component in any system, due to it being the only mechanical piece of hardware in a computer. Glad to help though