My laptop is almost finished...

Alright, so I want to figure out what the most likely cause of expiration will be for my laptop. Then, I want to try to treat that problem so I can extend my laptop's life a bit.

I'm proud to say that I have had this laptop for almost 15 months, which is a record for me! The built-in keyboard is no more, mostly destructed - missing 14 keys. The mousepad frequently malfuctions and causes the pointer to skip across the computer screen. The mousepad buttons have to be set in reverse (left-handed settings). If they are not, the left button will auto-click randomly without being touched.

Now, the important stuff. There was only 250mb (approx) left on my hard drive last month. I threw away some movies I had saved and got it to 3gb. I did a little clean up earlier today and now there is about 7.5gb of free space. I only have 127.03GB of music in iTunes though. Anyway, there is plenty of space so everything should be fine.

Major problems:

- Wireless Internet connection is extremely slow. It has bursts of energy but in the AM and most of the time it can't break a download speed of 2kb/s. It ranks as 98% worse for downloading than other computers tested within my ISP. 96% worse for uploading. Good luck watching a video, takes 1-2 mins to load 5 seconds of videos.

- a simple computer game lags. This never happened even just a few weeks ago. It's a SNES rom game, should be no reason for this. Not associated with the Internet as it's on my computer.

- I would run a virus scan but I can't. I have a Norton program but it only shows warnings for cookies which seems insignificant. I tried to download AVG but after over two hours it stopped and said I had to retry. I was almost 90% there too.

- Laptop is getting loud. Not necessarily the fan either. I had this problem with my previous laptop right before it stopped working for good. I abused that laptop a bit too much (not just heavy use, but physically) though. Not sure how serious of a problem it is. I wouldn't dare to open the case, it never ends well when I do. I had a brand new laptop once, worked fine, ended up scrapping it as an 'experiment'.

- Laptop has been on almost 24/7 ever since I first bought it (over 14 months ago). It had a bit of down time here and there but I wouldn't credit more than a total of 5 days off since purchasing it.

So, is there anything I can do to make it healthier? I don't want to do a roll back (system restore?) because I have too much stuff (not organized) that I need. Is there some sort of scan (not antivirus) that can be done to determine what is causing the problem? Or do I just have to wait till it shuts down unexpectedly and go buy a new one?

Help?

 

Culprit could be your hard drive. Since it is one of the only components with moving parts, it's prone to a higher rate of failure than other components. Degradation of the hard drive can cause many of the symptoms you listed above, including very slow load times, data corruption, sluggish startups and shutdown, occasional noise (could be the bearings are going bad), and otherwise anomalous behavior.

My recommendation would be to immediately move all of your files to an external drive, then do a format and clean reinstallation of the operating system. On a fairly fast system this process should not take any longer than an hour or two. Make sure you have your manufacturer's driver disc (or go the their website and download all applicable drivers to your external drive) before you wipe the drive. If the problem persists after you have reinstalled Windows (I'm assuming it's Windows) then it's safe to assume that the hard drive is failing, in which case you would need to purchase a replacement. It may be that you only have a corrupted OS, but judging from the amount of time the machine has been running, you might have one or more components which are on the brink of breaking down.

The easiest way to determine whether its hardware- or software-based is to reinstall the OS and see how the system performs. However, a bad hard drive may result in failure to reinstall the OS or format the drive, which is why it's imperative that you copy all your data off the laptop as soon as possible. If you get the same sluggish results on a fresh Windows installation, I would recommend MemTest and SiSoftware Sandra to do a little system testing. If you are still unable to determine the cause by this point, you should take it to a local (reputable) IT shop and have someone look it over. Or, if you are familiar with hardware components, swap out the old drive for a new one once you have copied the data off.

Keep in mind a very nasty Rootkit or some other virus might be the cause of your troubles, in which case a format and reinstall of Windows would completely solve the problem unless there are also hardware failures present. I would not recommend doing a system restore in your case, since the restoration would likely not effect any deeply-rooted virus which has buried itself in the OS, and if the hard drive itself is about to break down a restore will still be of no use.

A side note: Make sure your copy of Windows is legitimate! Pirated versions of Windows inevitably become unstable over time and cause nothing but problems and perhaps legal issues. I'm not saying your version isn't legitimate, it's simply a suggestion that may or may not apply to you.

I hope I helped a bit.