Unsure about a hardware issue

Hey everybody, if you'd be so kind, I could use a little guidance.

My girlfriend's laptop seems to be ****ed. I've been trying to figure out what's wrong with it, but I'm only halfway through my CompTIA A+ book. (Taking the exam next week!)

Anyways, here's what's going on.

OS:Windows 7 64-bit
Acer Aspire 4551-2615 laptop
AMD Athlon II P320 Dual-core 2.09GHz

A while back (early June) her laptop would turn on, but wouldn't boot up. She took it to some minor repair shop and they wiped her hard drive (without her permission) and told her that the partitions on the hard drive were messed up, but that they did not replace the hard drive. After that it would boot, but would occasionally run slowly, until August, when it wouldn't boot again. I was able to take care of it then by booting in recovery mode. It worked ok for a while, but recently it's taken a dive off the deep end.

Now it will start up, but once windows loads there is a solid, 1-2 minute lag time between when a command is given, and when it executes that command. Norton popped up and said that several of my programs were using an unusual amount of processing power. (Stuff like chrome and other small things) I checked the running processes and nothing seems to be spiking.

This doesn't happen when I boot in safemode. I ran memtest +86 to check the memory, and everything turned out fine. Anti-malware bytes, Avast, and Advanced System Care are unable to turn up any malware.

Then come the blue screens. It happens every once in a while, and I managed to get the crash dump info from them:

(crash dump file 1)
BugCheck 7A, {fffff6fc500133e8, ffffffffc0000185, 51a6c880, fffff8a00267d8f8}

Probably caused by : ntkrnlmp.exe ( nt! ?? ::FNODOBFM::`string'+34bce )

(crash dump file 2)

BugCheck 7A, {fffff6fc50057ac0, ffffffffc0000185, 83536880, fffff8a00af58090}

Probably caused by : ntkrnlmp.exe ( nt! ?? ::FNODOBFM::`string'+34bce )

Any suggestions? I'm kind of stumped.

 

Hi try running the HD manufacturer's HD diagnostic test. Do both the quick and the extended test. See if the HD passes both to rule that out. http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

When it didn't run in August do you remember what the error was? Was it a bootmgr problem that recovery fixed? (I'm only thinking that you might be getting random corruption on the HD due to a failing drive.)

 

Lucky me, the HDD is Toshiba, which currently does not provide diagnostics. (toshiba mk3265gsx to be exact) As for August, I'm not really sure what the cause was. I actually got help resolving that issue in another thread on this site.

 

Greetings, DustinJSanders.

I'm leaning towards agreeing with sach2 about the imminent HD failure.

One thing you might try is booting to a Linux distro (Mint, Puppy and Ubuntu are all nice and easy). Download the .iso file, and burn that file as an image to a CD/DVD (ImgBurn and InfraRecorder are good free .iso burning programs if you don't already have one).

A quick tutorial for the image burning process using ImgBurn is located here.

Then boot to that disk, and run the OS as a live environment (in other words, don't install it - just run it from the optical drive).

Put the machine through some stresses, see if the crash occurs, which will indicate if this is a hardware or a software problem.

An added plus: while you're running the live Linux, you should be able to transfer any important data to a flash drive, just in case.

 

Thanks Caliban. If I can set that up to run on a flash drive I'll try to boot it from that, otherwise I'll dig up a cd somewhere. Earlier this morning I ran checkdisk on it and windows found a few bad kernels and replaced them. The machine seems to be operating alright for the moment, but I will continue to try the stress tests and report back.

 

Lili USB Creator, or search unetbootin or pendrivelinux will all put a linux ISO on USB very easily.

I think Seagate Seatools will evaluate any HD although it won't repair errors. The randomness of the errors seems to point to a failing hard drive causing corruption.

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I'm going to drop this thread here which is probably not related but you did say your laptop ran OK in safe mode, so there may be a service that is slowing things down in normal mode. http://forums.techguy.org/8044123-post11.html

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Hi, Caliban. Good to see you!

 

Misunderstood about the Safe Mode - thought that the symptoms were presenting in all modes. My bad.

One quick question: you mentioned avast! and Norton - these programs are not both running on this machine, are they?

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Hey, sach2! Hope you're doing well!

 

I second Sach2 and Caliban's vote for the HDD being the likely culprit - with the caveat that standard short drive tests don't always catch failing drives.

I have easily diagnosed and/or replaced 50+ HDDs on home and small office PCs over the past year. In at least 25% of the cases, S.M.A.R.T., dskchk /f, or a drive mfr's short DST (SeaTools, Data Lifeguard, etc) would "pass" a drive that - if a long DST was run - would come up "fail" (without getting too geeky, this often deals with critical HDD firmware updates hidden deep in drive mfr. websites - if the drive tanks, the firmware update is useless) .

Given the low cost of HDDs and the hassles of reloading an iffy drive, my motto is "When in doubt, throw it out." Spending $60 on a new HDD is a bargain compared to attempting 3-4 hours of CPR on a drive that (even if brought back to life) is likely to crash again soon.

BTW, my pick on notebook drives is the WD Scorpio Black (7200 RPM and a 5-Star Rating on NewEgg). Street price for a 320GB @ NewEgg is around $60.

Hope this helps.

 

Ok, yeah, looks like her HD is failing. I've been looking around New Egg and TigerDirect for a replacement for her and I've got one more question. Her current HD's speed is 5400. There are a few with faster speeds in our price range, though I'm unsure if her memory or processing speed will create a bottle neck negating any faster HD speeds. She's got 3GB ram (64 bit OS) and a dual core 2.10 GHz cpu. Would it be pointless to get a HD with 7200 or higher?

 

As far as the RPM of the drive, some manufacturers use slower spindle speeds to conserve energy. Which can equivocate to longer battery life in a laptop. Even with an SSD, I don't see a bottleneck issue with that laptop.

gman, what would you say to an SSD?

OCZ has a pretty good one, that's a bit more than a $60 platter drive. Only catch is it's 40GB. However, if you use an external platter drive, or you aren't storing a massive amount of data...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233188

If you're going for price w/ a 16MB cache:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148741