dying laptop motherboard ?

taerra

Honorable
Sep 2, 2012
4
0
10,510
Howdy, I need some insight on troubleshooting my wife's old laptop.

She has a 6 years old Toshiba satellite with an amdx2 processor. It acts up a lot, feels very sluggish, hangs a lot. It behaves like the hard drive would be faulty ( I've seen this happen a lot on desktops at work ).

But that's the thing where I'm stuck, everything checks up fine. I ran different tests and everything checks alright, but the laptop is still performing poorly ( mem test, HDD test, smart test, graphic/memory/cpu stress test and more... ). I picked up a copy of Hiren's boot cd and other various softwares and they all agree that the system is green, but performance is clearly affected even after a fresh windows 7 ultimate install.

The system *works* per say, but performance is sketchy at best. Laptop has been cleaned up.

Insights ? Thanks !
 

vesp3r

Distinguished
Dec 11, 2014
215
0
18,910
when you cleaned the laptop did you reapply thermal paste? This is usually the problem with old laptops. Also check the cpu and ram usage. if ram usage is too high then you might need ram upgrade
See also if there is bios update you can apply
 

Louise Porkolt

Estimable
Nov 25, 2014
135
1
4,660
Biggest speed issue is the updates. New software is more secure so more code for same program, logically it slows down. try reinstalling fresh winXP (just as example) it will run fast again until you install ALL updates, unless you have other issues, like heat building up inside. In this case I would blow out the airways of the fan !

Let us know.
Cheers, Louise.
 

vesp3r

Distinguished
Dec 11, 2014
215
0
18,910
old laptop->old parts->low performance. best thing you can do is track the heat and either use older drivers or latest ones with bios update
Since you said its a ~6 years old laptop i assume it doesnt have over 2GB ram... maybe even 1GB. What else you can do is add more virtual memory but i doubt it will get any better
 

taerra

Honorable
Sep 2, 2012
4
0
10,510
The part I don't get *aside from aging of components* is that the laptop used to run better than that, my wife used to be able to play world of warcraft on it, now it's so sluggish I'm not even sure the game would launch. As for RAM, I'm not home atm but I remember boosting the RAM at some point, I THINK it's sitting at 2gb atm.
 

Louise Porkolt

Estimable
Nov 25, 2014
135
1
4,660
what's the operating system ?
Vista? 7?
Have you tried cleaning the airways ? I don't suggest to upgrade older laptops. (not older than 4 years).
Devide the price you payed by the years you have it... shouldn't you buy a new one ?

Cheers, Louise.
 

vesp3r

Distinguished
Dec 11, 2014
215
0
18,910


Im not suggesting hardware upgrade either, but if he wants to use the laptop he can atleast do some maintenance on it
I know i have old laptop (~8 years) that used to run games like Call of Duty 4... now sometimes i wait like 2 minutes to open browser. Ofc i havent touchd a single driver on it and never updated bios... although i installed windows 7 and update it regulary.
Anyways Windows 7 should run way better than Vista, and it should give you less BSoD than XP
For now make sure its cooling and its not running anything that can make it work slower
 

taerra

Honorable
Sep 2, 2012
4
0
10,510
Thanks Vesp3r, that solved my problem. I had totally forgotten to re apply paste. the one that was on there was all crumbly and powdery after 6 years of world of warcraft abuse lol. Cleaned and applied new paste, updated BIOS and it works a heluva lot better now, MUCH smoother.