Alkaline Posted August 13, 2008 Report Share Posted August 13, 2008 Whilst burning a disc onto my hard drive my cd drive suddenly decided to go nuts and went off spinning like nobodies business and the song i was listening to at the time (from the hard drive) started skipping and crackling. It then hung up and stuck permanently.I tried restarting and it took ages to boot-up and the audio crackled away on start-up.Now although i can get onto the internet and open up programs etc the whole system is painfully slow and it won't let me run a defrag or to check for errors to see if that solves the problem. When i try to run a defrag it comes up with something about Chkdisk /f or something. I am also running a scan on AVG just in case but i don't think it's a virus :/Anyone got any ideas? I really hope my laptop isn't screwed as i can't afford to buy a new PC at the moment Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teabags Posted August 13, 2008 Report Share Posted August 13, 2008 The crackling and slowness your talking about makes me think it your HDD thats buggered. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alkaline Posted August 13, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 13, 2008 The crackling and slowness your talking about makes me think it your HDD thats buggered.What's the scoop with sorting that out on a laptop? Is it a total waste of time? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Johnny Mac Posted August 14, 2008 Report Share Posted August 14, 2008 Have you backed everything up just incase it does go tits up soon?You SHOULD be able to replace the hard drive easily enough if you need to. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teabags Posted August 14, 2008 Report Share Posted August 14, 2008 Replacing a hard-drive shouldnt cause too much of a problem. I'd get someone else to do it on a laptop though. Back everything to some sort of external hard-drive, such as an iPod, it might be painfully slow if the HDD is indeed fucked, and you won't be able to do anything while it's doing it (trying to work on it while its copying a bunch of data could lead to blue screens of death etc) but still, better than losing everything. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neepheid Posted August 14, 2008 Report Share Posted August 14, 2008 What kind of laptop is it? Replacing the hard drive should be a relatively simple operation, they're usually user accessible without too much trouble. Just need to make sure you get the right kind. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alkaline Posted August 16, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 16, 2008 Right, i finally managed to de-frag what can only be described as the most fragmented hard drive i have ever seen (strange seen as though i only de-fragged it last month). This has reduced Windows loading time from about 10 minutes to 5 minutes give or take a few. I have about 45% of my HDD free and i ran a disc-check and error checks. The disc check got rid of about 1.5GB of shite. I ran AVG in safe mode and it yielded nothing but the odd tracking cookie.Loading times for programs once i'm actually up and running aren't too bad. I can surf the net and get into folders, look at pictures etc. It's still pretty slow though and i still get the choppy sound and stuttering/hang ups when i try and play any media and also on things like the welcome sound on windows start-up. However, i can stream anything off the HDD with no problems using my PS3 which kind of makes me think that it may not be a HDD problem if i can access it and it runs from an external source with no problems.Anyone got any ideas?It's a Dell(yeah i know) Inspiron 1300 and i have no Windows XP disc. Any further advice or help would be greatly appreciated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Nicol Posted August 16, 2008 Report Share Posted August 16, 2008 The best way to fix it is to go to control panel/user accounts/create new account. Shut down your laptop then log on using the new account. Delete your old account. I'm sure that will solve your problem.Mark. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alkaline Posted August 16, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 16, 2008 The best way to fix it is to go to control panel/user accounts/create new account. Shut down your laptop then log on using the new account. Delete your old account. I'm sure that will solve your problem.Mark.Hmmm, i may give that a go but as it's not the log-in time that's the problem it's the time between the switch on and getting to the log-in screen. I'm not sure how that would correct the audio problem either. Thanks for the advice though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teabags Posted August 16, 2008 Report Share Posted August 16, 2008 What Mark suggested, though it sounds ridiculous, may actually work. Windows defys all fucking logic sometimes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spellchecker Posted August 16, 2008 Report Share Posted August 16, 2008 how much ram do you have in the laptop? if you exceed your physical ram windows will start using a swapfile on the hard disk for copying pages out of memory. that is really slow and rubbish, and could be causing your performance bottlenecks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alkaline Posted August 17, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 17, 2008 how much ram do you have in the laptop? if you exceed your physical ram windows will start using a swapfile on the hard disk for copying pages out of memory. that is really slow and rubbish, and could be causing your performance bottlenecks.How do i find that out? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
soundian Posted August 17, 2008 Report Share Posted August 17, 2008 How do i find that out? Right-click My Computer and select properties. It'll tell you at the bottom of the General tab.If you want to find out the size of your swapfile it's in the advanced tab. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
threeornothing Posted August 17, 2008 Report Share Posted August 17, 2008 Experienced this many times, its usually caused by a dodgy disc, and forces your cd drive into PIO mode (ie. software mode) as opposed to DMA (hardware mode), this is why your mp3's are skipping when you are burning discs, as the CD drive is hogging all the system resources. Theres a simple fix...Download this file, run it and reboot. I don't accept any resposibility for any damage it may do, but I have come across this loads of times and this has always fixed it.http://winhlp.com/tools/resetdma.vbs 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
soundian Posted August 17, 2008 Report Share Posted August 17, 2008 Experienced this many times, its usually caused by a dodgy disc, and forces your cd drive into PIO mode (ie. software mode) as opposed to DMA (hardware mode), this is why your mp3's are skipping when you are burning discs, as the CD drive is hogging all the system resources. Theres a simple fix...Download this file, run it and reboot. I don't accept any resposibility for any damage it may do, but I have come across this loads of times and this has always fixed it.http://winhlp.com/tools/resetdma.vbs You can check whether you're in PIO or DMA in system>device manager>IDE ATA then advanced settings in properties of primary/secondary channels. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alkaline Posted August 17, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 17, 2008 Well, i checked and it's definitely in PIO mode. Would a Registry cleaner sort that out? The link that Keilan posted was just a load of script that i don't know what i'm doing with..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
soundian Posted August 17, 2008 Report Share Posted August 17, 2008 Well, i checked and it's definitely in PIO mode. Would a Registry cleaner sort that out? The link that Keilan posted was just a load of script that i don't know what i'm doing with..... I take it you've tried changing in device manager and it's having none of it. Have a look at this, it may be helpful. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alkaline Posted August 17, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 17, 2008 I take it you've tried changing in device manager and it's having none of it. Have a look at this, it may be helpful.I managed to fix it by uninstalling the drivers and restarting.Thanks to everyone who helped out (especially Soundian and Keilan 303 who pointed me in the right direction). I fucking love you all 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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