All Components Crashed, Laptop Still Works but Much Slower, What Happened?

[electro_neanderthal]

So, I have an old laptop and I've been looking at ways to restore its original performance because something happened a few years back and it hasn't run the same ever since. For reference, I have a Sony Vaio VPCF120FD with a first Gen i5 mobile processor (dual core) and an Nvidia 310M graphics card (512MB).

Anyway, I had unplugged my laptop and was working on battery power when all my applications shut down and things got buggy. However, it managed to return to desktop and gave me several errors: RAM crashed, video card crashed, processor crashed, HDD crashed, etc. Basically every physical component crashed.

It then refused to boot up in normal mode (blue screen), but after booting up in safe mode, I was able to boot it up in regular mode afterwards just fine, with one issue: The PC was much slower than it used to be. So I sent it in to Sony under warranty, and they found nothing wrong and reinstalled Windows 7. It came back just as slow as I sent it off. It's been 7 years since then (the laptop is 9 years old)

I suspect the motherboard failed, but am not sure because it worked afterward (at reduced performance). A processor error or RAM error could have also caused an issue like this (I think: they both also connect to and deal with instructions from the other components), so I really don't know what happened.

Does anybody know for sure, or has anyone experienced this? I'd rather know what I'm getting into before buying stuff to "upgrade", as trial and error is not an ideal process financially.

 

[hang-the-9]

I wold not buy anything to fix or upgrade a 9 year old laptop since you can find newer replacements for about $200 or less that are actually working without buying parts to test on yours. If you can find some cheap or free RAM to test with, try that.

I just bought an almost new Dell laptop with a solid state drive for under $200, so you can find some good used deals, usually locally on craigslist gets you the best prices and you can see it in person.

 

[electro_neanderthal]

I wold not buy anything to fix or upgrade a 9 year old laptop since you can find newer replacements for about $200 or less that are actually working without buying parts to test on yours. If you can find some cheap or free RAM to test with, try that.

I just bought an almost new Dell laptop with a solid state drive for under $200, so you can find some good used deals, usually locally on craigslist gets you the best prices and you can see it in person.

Thanks for the reply, however even $100 is out of my budget, since this is more of a "can I fix it" than a "I need to fix it". I don't want to waste money, so my budget is low. I have no need for another PC, and this one works fine for the way it's being used.

I know asking this was a long shot: I was asking if someone had experienced something similar to determine if it was one component that had gone bad or more than one. If it's one, and that one is replaceable, I can probably get it for cheap enough.

I think I can test the RAM though, so thank you for that idea, I'll check the clock speed first. I remember the time a new desktop had a one-time glitch where the UEFI had automatically lowered the RAM clock speed, maybe that's what happened and I just never thought to check? Thank you for that idea, too. I'll try them out.

Edit: RAM was fine, processor as well. Both were running at the factory clock, so now I have no clue what it is.