Unusually Slow

Hey guys,

I have in my possession, my friend's Toshiba Satellite L755-S5349 which has some unbelievable latency.

I have ruled out any software related issues like malware, since I started by deleting the existing partitions, creating new ones, and reinstalling windows. I installed Windows 7 pro 64bit and Windows 8 pro with Media Center 64 bit, to check the latency between the OSes and it is equally slow. The specs of the Laptop are:


Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2330M CPU @ 2.20GHz
(Installed Physical Memory Modules)
BANK 0 - Size 2.00 GB
BANK 2 - Size 2.00 GB
600GB SATA HDD (200MB-System, 120GB-Win 7, 100GB-Win 8, 375GB-Storage)

The latency is such that sometimes a simple task like opening the Computer folder can take about 10 seconds.

I was told that previously, there were multiple malware found on the PC and that it suffered from a crash and has since been slow.

I have done a RAM test with Memtest86 v4.20 and it passed both sticks.

I'm going to do the malware tests anyway and post the results, since I'm not sure if a MBR virus could cause this. I'll post the results in the malware forums and link to here and vice versa.

Can you guys tell me what I should be checking? That could cause such latency? Can a Motherboard failure cause such a failure, yet still work well enough to run the laptop?

Can you help me? I'm stumped.

 

Thanks, I will try this after my malware scans.

 

I have uploaded my malware scan logs.

I already did a preliminary scan using the error checking utility for all 3 hard disk partitions and nothing was found, no bad sectors. I'm currently scanning using command prompt;

chkdsk Drive: /F /R

But since preliminary scans were clean, I'm not expecting any bad sectors here.

Any more suggestions?

 

Even if chkdsk shows no problems, it still could be a "stealth" hard drive issue.

I can't explain the technical details; however I see this problem on customers' PCs every few months in my shop. When I put in a different hard drive and reload Windows, the PC speed goes back to normal.

I would borrow or purchase another hard drive, reload Windows and see what happens.

Hope this helps.

 

I have a spare laptop HDD, I will try it.

Drive has been confirmed malware free by TimW.

 

I just want to say thanks to all who helped me.

All the windows scans were clean (error checking and chkdsk) - no errors or bad sectors, theoretically, this HDD is good but thanks to the suggestion of gman863, I swapped it with a working laptop's HDD to check and the latency went to the new PC and the one I was working on worked fine. When I swapped them back, the latency returned.

Faulty HDD confirmed.

Strange, but true.

 

Update - Deeper down the rabbit hole;

I downloaded SeaTools for Windows from Seagate's site and ran all the available tests for the Toshiba hard drive and the drive passed all!!! How is that possible?

Anyone have any ideas on other tools I can use to test the hard drive? This hard drive error has to be detectable somehow.