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[Rhodan]

Hi folks,

Lately, I've been experiencing very annoying and mysterious slowdowns on my laptop, forcing me to reboot.  I've also had issues while booting the laptop, which seem related.  I'm hoping there are some clever souls on here who can help me pinpoint the cause.

My laptop is a HP Compaq 8510p Business Notebook PC, which I bought for cheap when I started college.  It is currently about 3 and a half years old.  Since it was a cheap college deal, I don't have a Windows Vista CD or anything so I can't reformat it.

Anyways, here is what happens:
When doing certain relatively intensive tasks, my laptop suddenly slows down to a crawl.  Everything still works, but has suddenly become incredibly slow.  No programs crashed or anything.  Some get the (not responding) tag but always come through eventually.  Any programs connected to the internet lose connection since their connection times out.  Closing applications doesn't speed up anything, the only solution is a reboot.
Task Manager tells me both CPU cores run at 100%, but neither Task Manager or Process Explorer can find any process that is using all resources or that shouldn't be there.  My RAM is doing just fine and lowers properly as I (slowly) close any running programs.

Usually when this happens I am playing either Minecraft or Second Life, both rather intensive programs.  I tried vanilla Minecraft on lowest settings, but it still happens.  On Second Life it most often happens when I'm playing a Flash game in Chrome or Firefox with Second Life running in the background, but it has also happened during normal play with as many other programs closed as possible.
Framsticks and Dragon Age: Origins also experience these Slowdowns of Death, but I haven't used these programs much.

The frequency of these slowdown seems to be related to how long my laptop has been 'resting'.  When I reboot immediately after such a slowdown, chances of a new slowdown are rather high.  When I've not used my laptop for a day or played some older less intensive games, it almost seems as if the problem is gone, only to strike again eventually.

Things I have checked:
I scanned for viruses, adware, spyware, the lot.  Updated my graphics card drivers, updated Java, cleaned up anything that could be cleaned, installed Process Explorer to look for strange processes and installed Speccy to keep an eye on my hardware temperature.  Nothing malicious or out of the ordinary was found.

Now, the weird stuff!
On two occasions, the slowdown was present from the moment I booted my laptop.  The first time this happened I kept rebooting and rebooting and the slowdown would not go away.  Even the "Safe Mode" selection screen was horrendously slow, rendering it line by line.  After a while I realized my adaptor had 'sparked' when plugging it into the socket...
The slow boot was fixed by unplugging the laptop from the main power line and booting it on battery alone.
The second time had the same symptoms and it was once again fixed by booting on pure battery.  This time the adaptor had been snugly sitting plugged into the same socket for weeks though. No sparks.
Today, after another slowdown, my laptop turned itself off at the "Safe Mode" selection screen each time I booted it, until I once again booted it on battery alone.

On Minecraft this slowdown seems to behave very strange. Using F3, I can see my CPU usage spike to the max.  When I quit to the main screen, it grows slightly better but not much. Once I fully close Minecraft, the slowdown is at its worst.

I had similar slowdown crashed before, but very infrequent and only while playing intensive Flash games while having Second Life open.  Not playing Flash games and Second Life at the same time helped.
When the slowdowns became frequent again, I was mostly playing Minecraft so I thought it was related to my mods.  Removing mods did seem to help at first, but inevitably even vanilla Minecraft caused a slowdown. Then the 1.5 update was released and suddenly the slowdowns seemed to be gone until a week or so after when it started all over again.

So yeah, I have no clue what might be causing this.  I have been playing Second Life and Minecraft for as long as I've had this laptop (or as soon as the game existed) and for more than three blissful years it all worked perfectly.  Since it happens on intensive programs, it seems hardware related.  Especially considering the identical symptoms appearing even before windows has launched in some cases.  The battery thing also seems strange, so could it be somehow related to internal power supplies?  Perhaps my hardware fizzles out when it tries to take too much power or something?
I don't know a lot about hardware issues, so I have no clue at all.

Thanks for reading my rant, hopefully someone knows what's up.
(A new laptop, that's what's up. Sigh.)

[ChairmanPoo]

Used to happen to me in my old netbook under xp. Some hints:

- Consider switching OS. I haven't had the problem again with either Ubuntu or Windows 7

- As a temporary fix: doing system restores to some months before tended to ease my slowdowns.

- Check for infections, using different antiviruses. I don't think it was the only cause, but at one point I realized my computer was ridden with Virut. Avira had failed to detect it.

[Tellemurius]

Good question, have you checked the temperature of the cpu? its possible that its overheating.

[Peewee]

Task Manager tells me both CPU cores run at 100%, but neither Task Manager or Process Explorer can find any process that is using all resources or that shouldn't be there.

Virus. You just haven't found it yet.

Probably a rootkit.

[Heron TSG]

It's a stretch, but is your desktop a horrific mess? That can really slow down Windows. I just cleaned mine up from ~40 icons to about 10, and the difference is gigantic.

[Phmcw]

Sound like temp problem. Does all the fans work?

[Rhodan]

Scanned for rootkits, but found nothing.

My desktop is sparkly clean, it does indeed cause a lot of slowdown when its cluttered so I never put anything on there.

My laptop runs at an acceptable speed until the slowdown crash happens.  It has lost surprisingly little performance over the years, until of course these slowdown crashes started to happen.

All the fans work, but my laptop does get very hot.  Speccy says my hardware temperatures are acceptable, but I don't really trust it.  I've placed my laptop on a few small items to lift it off my desk a bit, perhaps this will help.   It doesn't explain the strange behaviour where I have to boot it on battery alone when it refuses to start, but perhaps that's just a coincidence.

[lordnincompoop]

very hot

Since it's 3.5 years old, I'll bet it's dust. Buy a can or compressed air, gut it and blow the crud away.

I'm not really sure how to clean dust out of a laptop, so you'll have to look that up.

[Tellemurius]

very hot

Since it's 3.5 years old, I'll bet it's dust. Buy a can or compressed air, gut it and blow the crud away.
I'm not really sure how to clean dust out of a laptop, so you'll have to look that up.

You blow it through the cooling vents for simple clean or gut it for extreme clean.Does it get loud when its hot?

[Rhodan]

I haven't crashed yet since putting my laptop a bit higher, but I've had days without crashes before so it could still go wrong.  I opened it up and cleaned out the dust just to be sure, but it wasn't that dusty.

Thanks for all the help so far, guys.  Seems like it's really a temperature issue, the rebooting problem is probably something unrelated with similar symptoms.

[Tellemurius]

It reboots when it overheats.

[Rhodan]

It reboots when it overheats.

No, when the slowdown happens I have to shut the laptop down myself, it never actually crashes or reboots on its own.  I can even just click shutdown and wait half an hour or so and it'll shut down on its own 'properly'.
The rebooting issue is when the laptop decides to be in slowdown mode as soon as I start it, and no matter how many times I reboot it just stays slow, no matter how long I wait between reboots.  Until I pull out the powercord and make it boot on battery alone.  The first time this happened my laptop had been switched off for a day, so I don't think it was the heat, unless the heat was caused by the power cord somehow.  There was a spark.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I also have a slowdown problem, although in my case the cause is very specific and clearly identifiable. If your harddrive is making odd repeating sounds while the slowdown happens, that means it's probably found a file it's having trouble reading - because of bad sectors or what-have-you. Since most laptops have just one HDD, when it locks up on a read error it also locks up most of the system - excepting things that run in RAM, such as the mouse pointer, the windows themselves or things like hardware monitors. As soon as a program tries to access the disk, it halts until the drive starts working properly again.

The most frustrating thing is, the SMART system won't do anything about bad sectors with only read errors. It just marks these down for rechecking when something's written to them. Good way to avoid false positives, but not very helpful.