Computer is dying!

[McAvoy]

Ok. My laptop is falling apart. battery no longer charges, but I can replace that. The CD drive no longer reads, but that can be replaced. I have an external which works with about 90% of the Cds I use.

However, now computer crashes when I transfer anything larger than 400 MB off of an external device. Tried all USB ports and different external devices. It works if I do them individually but anything larger will crash it. No blue screen of death. It just crashes Windows Explorer, so no Start menu or desktop icons. It has Windows Vista and it takes a good twenty minutes for it to load. About 75% of the time, the startup screen will freeze and I have to turn if off and then back on to get it working again.

The computer is almost three years old. No damage done to it, and 95% it sits on my desk. The computer is a HP 1275dx with Windows Vista. Cannot afford to buy a new one. I need it for school, but I can get along with using a flash drive and the campus's library or computer lab.

Any suggestions before I take it to a computer repair place?

[alexmann]

1. Delete any programs you dont need.
2. Run CCleaner on your registry.
3. Run CCleaner on your cookies, temp files etc.
4. Defrag your hard drive.
5. Run an antivirus scan.
6. Run an antispyware scan.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head. If I think of anything else i'll let you know.

[stitch626]

Boot it up in Safe Mode and see if it still has the problems.

Then attempt to follow the steps above.

[mwhittington]

And if all else fails, wrap it in PrimaCord, and make it go boom.

[Primefalcon]

Before ou go reinstalling or anything, download a Linux livedisk and play around with that, also test your ram (very cheap to replce) and hard drive... I laso very much doubt cccleaner would be of any help whatsoever.... the registry are just basic plain text files.... taking up very very little space anyhow... not really any point to cleaning it out

[Nickswitz]

Sounds almost like the CPU may be dying, it may be that it is becoming overworked as the CPU load gets too high, and if it is old enough, or if the processor is dying then the load it can handle may be fairly small.

[Mikey]

Step 1 - find someone with a nice, newer, better-functioning laptop.
Step 2 - find a friend to distract owner of said laptop.
Step 3...

[McAvoy]

I learned that I have to do a system recovery down to the original specs. This is done but I have to obviously backup everything. I need to buy at least a 750 GB external hard drive to do this, so I have to wait.

If the system recovery doesn't do this, then new hard drive.

[alexmann]

Ouch. I did a complete system restore a while ago and it took about 5 hours in total. Probably longer for you with so much to back up.

[McAvoy]

My laptop holds two 500 GB hard drives. Just in case I will backup the second hard drive as well.

Here is the issue: it will take a reeeaaaaallllyyy long time because I would have to transfer each file more than 500MB one at a time.

[alexmann]

Why?

[Griffin]

Presumably he has a lot of files, transfering them one by one would take a very long time.

[alexmann]

I was asking why he would "have to transfer each file more than 500MB one at a time."

[Griffin]

Oh, sorry.

[alexmann]

Don't worry about it.