Solved! Gateway NX860 crashed to a crawl

[bahamut39]

Hello community! I'm wondering if anyone has some insight on a major problem I am having.

I have a Gateway NX860XL laptop running windows XP. It's almost exactly 4 years old. One night as I went to turn off the laptop I woke in
the morning to see that it was still on and telling me it was busy with a program. I can't remember which one, it may have been explorer (not Internet Explorer). Anyway I tried "End Task" but it just kept hanging there. So I just held down the power button for a cold shut down and went to work.

Upon coming home, I noticed that when the laptop booted it gave me an Intel Boot Agent error, but then proceeded to load windows. But at the loading screen it took forever, and so I just tried to boot into safe mode. Everything was to a crawl! Clicking the start button required a minute to even load the menu.

I proceeded to do a scan dsk from a dos boot CD, and everything checked out. I then tried to run a mem x86 test from a copy of Ubuntu on CD, which also seemed to check out. Then I just tried loading Ubuntu, but it would not
load. Strange!

So I figured I'd buy a new Hard Drive. Tried to reinstall windows XP, and it took nearly 2 days!! When finally installed on the new hard drive, everything was still functionig at a crawl. When I tried to install my drivers for my nVidia 6900gt go card, I got a bsod for nv4_display.dll error. So I've come to the conclusion it isn't my hard drive.

Thought it was maybe my BIOS because I was also still getting the Intel Boot Agent error. So I reflashed my BIOS sucessfully. Yet no change in performance. Then I did a registry scan. Everythig okay, but still no change. Ubuntu also still can not be installed or directly run from the CD.

When I boot windows the CPU (Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 2.0ghz) shows it is under nearly 100% load all the time, and it's usually due
to normal simple tasks taking some ridiculous %. Such as the taskmgr.exe using 45% of the CPU processor.

So what's the verdict? Is my CPU fried? Motherboard destroyed? I can't possibly think of any software or programing malfunction after all the checks I've done. So I'm wondering what you guys think, and if I should just give up
buy a new laptop?

 

[Emerald]

what are the temperatures?

are the fans working?

 

[hellwig]

Definately sounds like your CPU and/or motherboard is having issues. It might be that your CPU is fried and the computer is running the processor at a greatly-reduced speed to try to protect itself. Download CPU-Z and make sure that the speed and other information reported matches your processor.

http/www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

If it is the processor, you could try buying a new one and replacing it, although you might have to look to ebay these days. Could also be that the motherboard northbridge is damaged, but since you can't really replace the motherboard (unless you get lucky on ebay), you might be needing a new computer, sorry.

 

[bahamut39]

I intalled CPU-Z, but it took nearly 40 minutes. The processor was reading at it's normal speed.

I do not know what the temps are and my bios doesn't give me temp readings.

However, my guess is there is an issue with the motherboard because of the intel boot agent error and crash upon attempting video driver install.

Thank you for all your responses. There are now laptops on the market under $600 that beat the NX860XL specs and have Windows 7. I guess it's time for an upgrade.