I have had just about everything break down lately! Now it 's the Laptop.. I've tried everything from Defragment, ( took 4 hours!) AdAware, System Restore ( won't do it) to starting in SafeMode to try to diagnose the problem .. upon Start up.. loading Windows takes forever! 10 min or more.. just started doing it this week.. realllyyyy sllloooowww.. also the sound upon start up is scratchy... and stuttering. Then out of the blue it works fine for a few minutes... then when restarting .. back to taking forever to do anything at all. Plus a few programs are Not Responding... am I going to lose my harddrive?

In Windows ME and prior there was an option to Scan and Fix Errors... where is that on XP? I've run all the diagnostics and it shows everything OK.. no Hardware or Sharing Conflict.. I'm lost here..

Any ideas...? Of course, it's out of HP warranty as of a few weeks ago.. I could cry.

What are your laptop specs? Is the hard drive working excessively? Are you running on battery or AC power when this occurs?

It's on AC power.. it's an HP AMT Turino 64 Mobile Processer, 1.8 GHz, 512 KB, 1600 MHz system bus, 80 Hard Drive... is that what you are looking for? .. Let me know where to look and I'll get you want you want.. thanks!

I mainly wanted specs so I could guess how old/new your system is. I'd like to say your problems are NOT hardware related, but it's impossible to tell without actually using the machine.

You may want to do this to see if it fixes anything- Go to Start> Run>, type in msconfig, then go to the last tab for startup and disable ALL enabled startup programs. You'll be asked to restart, so go ahead and do that and see if it's still as bad after. (I know this may seem redundant since you did a safe mode startup, but it's still worth a try, imo)

If that doesn't do the trick, you can try going into your BIOS to see if there is a S.M.A.R.T status section that will tell you if your hard drive is running normally. If you don't have the option in your BIOS, you can download Drive Health to see.

DRIVE HEALTH: The Hard Disk analysing and monitoring tool based on the S.M.A.R.T. technology. Allows you to predict HDD failure and prevent losing critical data. (http://www.drivehealth.com/)

any ideas...? of course, it's out of hp warranty as of a few weeks ago.. i could cry. if you paid with a credit card that has some sort of rewards program, you might check to see if they offer extended warranty coverage on items you buy. often times the warranty your credit card company provides outlasts the one provided by the manufacturer. it's worth checking. -M

Oftentimes in this scenario I would back up my software and files and then wipe the hard drive and start from scratch with a clean Windows XP installation. Trying to repair hidden problems in an operating system if issues are this bad are time consuming. Try what skwillz suggested. If that fails, a clean installation is option 2.

Note: whenever I own a laptop again, I am running Linux, but I'm waiting to see what openSUSE 10.3 has to offer.

Hi Okcpulse, what do you use to back up your files?

Oftentimes I simply back them up to a DVD-RW. Once my FTP home server is up and running, I will be using it as a backup device.