You mean bizzaro bad laptop?

[mshea093]

Bizzaro! (Sealab anyone? )

Anyways,

I've got a friends laptop, Dell Inspiron E1505 I believe (One of those media editions with the crappy soundcards from ****, anyways..)

Her computer was having issues soft locking for a while, then eventually going- or just plain freezing up (mouse still moving). She thought it was a virus, but I cleaned up the whole computer- a little spyware, no viruses.

Still sucks.

So I decided to reinstall windows XP (Pro), installation goes smoothly, and it's time to get to service packs... and this is where it gets bizarro...

I have been able to install a few of the minor patches, but the installer freezes for most other patches (most importantly the clusters- SP1 and SP2). If i run auto updater in the background, it downloads and tries to install each little one- and most of the time it will freeze the installer (the rest of the computer still works fine!, no other lockups) I can ctrl+alt+delete to cancel update.exe and it will skip current update and try the next, 10% success rate (never able to install later mind you, so it's not random each time you try to install things).

I think it must be hardware, her cpu isnt' running hot, I checked her ram with a Ultimate boot Disk ram checker, I ran windows scandisk, no apparent errors.

What else could it be? I'm beyond confused, earlier this year another friend had a similar laptop issue, but her harddrive clean died a few days later- I wish I had a quicker answer then just waiting for this thing to die...

Thx for any suggestions

 

[sCribes]

How much ram is in it?

If not much, and when the installing process begins or gets to a certain point is it possible that the page file is kicking in to early, or once it does kick in its grabbing a bad sector on the HD.

Only thing i can think of would be the Ram or HD causing a lock up if the computer is clean.

Do you have a replacement laptop HD or Ram to try?

If there is more than one stick of ram, take one out, try it. and repeat with other. That may or may not pin point your problem.

 

[Jorsoft]

Hmm..could try a defrag, that's always work wonders and most pcs I work on could use one after a clean install.
Try downloading your updates from here and then installing them, maybe this could do help you too. Couldn't hurt I'm sure.
http://www.softwarepatch.com/windows/

 

[mshea093]

Ok well she has the laptop <now>, I'll get to check it again tomorrow,-

Let's say, she has only one piece of ram (I have no replacement/test parts for any laptop) is there any other program I can use to test it?

OR

Let's say ram's cool, but the harddrive may be at fault- is there an ultra reliable and rigorous testing tool out there? Scandisk is pretty weak! Let's also say, there are some bad sectors, is there a way to nix em, or avoid them?




Just maybe, is there a free program that can check an assortment of things? Eh maybe a bit much

Thx for any suggestions, and keep em coming!

 

[mshea093]

For each patch, I did also do an off microsoft site download from "the software patch" place, but that installer would freeze, either at (Validating Key, maybe checking for disk space, maybe backing up files etc).

Defrag- well atm it's a repartition, so that shouldn't be an issue... I think.

 

[sCribes]

download ubcd and burn the iso.

Can boot from it, has tons of both ram and hd testing utilities on it.

Im not sure what defragging would do for this situation, especially if it has a clean install on it.