Girlfriend's laptop weird problem

[Russ Smith]

This morning for the 2nd time in a month I woke up to a weird clicking sound which turns out to be her laptop. She has a habit of leaving the machine logged in to a site she plays tetris on, or this time a Philippines site, and we've gotten several viruses which I attributed to this before. I was unable to do anything on the machine, it had a weird error message about unable to write something or other try saving to another device. We weren't saving anything so I assumed that it was some sort of virus or spyware. Couldn't even get taskmaster to launch so I turned it off and on.

Booted up, got to welcome screen in XP, and hung. Turned off machine, took shower, turned machine back on after shower. Machine booted, but the startup menu(basically Norton Anti Virus) never fully launched and it hung. Rebooted again, got Norton started but it hung while trying to do a live update. I cancelled the update and had to reboot again. Turned it off as I left for work.


Does it sound like a virus, or a drive problem? If I can get Norton to run I'll run a full scan, and I'll run a spybot scan later too. I printed out instructions from work on how to do a defrag, does that make sense to do or is my problem likely hardware? I do work with a bunch of IT guys (my immediate boss is the IT manager) but we're in such a busy time right now with a move ending that I wouldn't think to ask any of them to help me work on a personal machine but I figured there's so many computer savvy guys here maybe someone can at least give me an idea of what to try first?

Machine is 18 months old, Toshiba satellite laptop. I've found a few issues that explain it slowing down of late, switched to Spybot and a had a ton of spyware that Adaware missed. Then I discovered that there were a ton of downloads still on the machine, everytime you launch an excel spreadsheet from email for example, it pops up as a download(think it's XP SP2 that does that). Well it turns out that when you close that file, it's still in some download folder. My girlfriend gets a lot of these from work she launches at home so I had to delete like 20+ files from the download section. After doing all that speed seemed to increase we weren't having the long delay to come on from powersave mode, but this morning we got the weird clicking deal going on.

 

[SweetD]

Sounds like your laptop is sick. Could be a bad hard drive, but it also so sounds like you got a virus.

 

[Ryanwb]

Clicking is a hard drive way of telling you it's about to go bad. I would start backing up data now

 

[Russ Smith]

Clicking is a hard drive way of telling you it's about to go bad. I would start backing up data now

That's what i'm afraid of, and I don't think a defrag will help there.

We'll see if I can get a virus scan to run and a defrag and then if I still have the problem I'll bring it in to work and ask one of the IT guys to help me get the data off (I think they can image it or something).

Then I'll have to find all the install disks, I know where I put them, but my girlfriend loves to "clean up clutter" so I'm highly concerned I won't be able to find all of them anymore.

thanks

 

[HeavyB3]

Yep, harddrive. I had the same problem about a year ago.

 

[Russ Smith]

Well I was able to run a defrag with no problems and cleared up some things. Then ran a virus scan, nothing. Ran spybot and adaware. Everything runs faster.

I'm assuming the problem isn't going to go away so I'll bring it in next week and get my IT guys to help me copy over data. Apparently at about 18 months old it's likely my hard disk is still under warranty so I'll make sure and see what Toshiba wants me to do to get a replacement.

thanks for the feedback, everyone in IT says the same thing ,hard disk.

 

[SweetD]

If you don't have much on your hard drive you can just pick up a USB drive or burn the data to CDs/DVDs.

 

[Russ Smith]

If you don't have much on your hard drive you can just pick up a USB drive or burn the data to CDs/DVDs.

Not much at all 76% of the 40 GB drive is free. Since I'm not familiar with that sort of thing, changing hard disks and stuff, I figured I'd take my IT friends up on their offer to help me and they said, just put it on our network for now so you know for sure it's there when you need it.

FYI the warranty was only 12 months so its not covered. I did find out that even though I had to register the laptop in order to get a rebate from Toshiba, remarkably it's not in their database, so even if it WAS under warranty, they wouldn't have covered it

I asked the guy if he could explain how I registered it to get a rebate and yet they say it's not registered and he said they had no explanation.

 

[SweetD]

Not much at all 76% of the 40 GB drive is free. Since I'm not familiar with that sort of thing, changing hard disks and stuff, I figured I'd take my IT friends up on their offer to help me and they said, just put it on our network for now so you know for sure it's there when you need it.

FYI the warranty was only 12 months so its not covered. I did find out that even though I had to register the laptop in order to get a rebate from Toshiba, remarkably it's not in their database, so even if it WAS under warranty, they wouldn't have covered it

I asked the guy if he could explain how I registered it to get a rebate and yet they say it's not registered and he said they had no explanation.

So are you looking to sell it?

 

[Russ Smith]

So are you looking to sell it?

No I think she might get mad if I sold her xmas present from me.

 

[CaptTurbo]

Russ, it sounds like a laptop that has been used to watch too much porn. Might be family talk time