David Lock

I posted in NSR about problems I had had getting a laptop repaired. The guy who tried to repair it and failed says that the laptop had around 18 1/2 gigs of the 20 gig drive being used and that it was so full that this would be likely to effect the PC's performance.

Is this likely or is he trying to make excuses? dl

Hanley

What was the problem with the laptop?

It stil has 1.5GB free so shouldn't be causing any major problems.

David Lock

Thanks Hanley, rather what I suspected. Lots of problems, primarily freezing up.

This was NSR thread but pretty boring for a sunny Saturday

David

http://bbs.scoobynet.co.uk/showthread.php?t=465101

mart360

have yopu done a defrag?? if not do it.. and 20meg its a bit small for a lappy..

better still pull off all your personall stuff and reformat/ reinstall the os

Mart

Foot_Tapper

Hi David, just read most of previous thread. Interesting, but does not surprise me about the guy who charged u £160.
A lot of the time, trying to "fix" a laptop these days isnt an exact science, especially as u never know the true history.
ie what has the person been installing, in what manner has it been used. These days with unprecedented ammounts of adware, malware whatever guise they come under; its a nightmare to support.
I look after 80 guys/gals with their lappies, a few surf around, next thing you know they say the whole thing freezes up on the net.... problem :- adware.
File sharing programs (peer to peer, are one cause), ie music download software.

As Hanley says, having a spare 1.5 Gb should be ok, but if the drive is very fragmented (and I bet it was) the "free" space, would actually be not free.

The freezing could be many things, and once you start trying to fix the causes, it can go on and on.
hardware problem (memory, motherboard etc)
disk space (freagmented drive)
hijack/adware/malware etc etc
The guy who tried to fix at £160 was probably doing his best, not to your satisfaction of course.
If its that bad, after an hour of trying; I would have advised to remove all actual important data and installed new OS if it was an option.
Because you could spend hours thinking you have uninstalled and deleted adware, and you never know if something is still lurking to kick it off again.
Sounds like company who finally "fixed" it, have ran an ad-aware type checker only.
This does not always get rid of it. Any remnant could start it off again.

Sorry for war & peace, hope it sheds some light.

cheers
Glenn

David Lock

Hi Glenn, thanks for comments. As I said in the original thread I do want to be fair to the guy but at the end of the day he left me with a machine that still wasn't working and I had to cough up another £70 + half a day to-ing and fro-ing to get it fixed. I can certainly understand the frustrations of supporting a laptop owned by a music loving student who almost certainly ignores her dad's advice to run Adaware/Norton with a defrag on a fairly regular basis!! However that's the business he chose to be in and so he has to take it on the chin now and again.

By law (Supply of Goods and Services Act) he is responsible for the £70 I had to pay to finish the job. He may be liable for some extra costs but I expect I will settle for that.

As an aside do you think that it would be reasonable to have expected him to have brought over some form of external drive that he could have used to back-up important files? I had told him on the phone that whatever he did I didn't want to lose certain files (music and uni work). He spent about 2 hours removing duplicate files to free up hard drive space when I think he could have pulled off these files onto a rewritable disc or external drive in a quarter of that time. atb, david

InvisibleMan

1.5gb isnt alot thats probably used by the virtual memory, thats the limit with our work laptops, they start slowing right down. Cronic HD noise is a sure sign of a defrag needed but defragging with only 1.5Gb space left is going to take ages, best to copy off any large single files then do it.

Foot_Tapper

Yes David, I agree with you.
If a guy who is obv working in that field was going to charge that ammount, he should have realised how time consuming it was going to be quite quickly.
Then given you the options and choice of where to go forward.
A bit like, taking your car to a garage and saying "have a look at this mate, and give me the SP".
I would also have thought he would carry a backup solution of sorts.

Maybe something like this is what he should have discussed:
Back up data to drive...write it to cd/dvd....rebuild laptop with basic OS & drivers.

Then you install additional software, updates & restore your data from the cd/dvd. (to save extra time costs)

Foot_Tapper

P.S. Is it now fixed ??????
P.P.S. just read the other thread fully ....pmsl been there as well (every day)

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

If hard drive does run out of space, then it can cause strange behaviour (crashes). 1.5Gb is very low, but I would not have thought low enough to cause this problem.

You do need to defrag, but before doing so clean out some rubbish.

First port of call is the delete the files in the recycle bin and get rid of the restore points on your machine that you do not need. Windows by default allows system restore and the recycle bin to consume VAST quantities of a machine

David Lock

Thanks a lot guys. Yes machine is now OK according to my last phone call to daughter.

Have taken onboard various comments and, as I write, I am trying to clear the contents of an external hard drive*, so that when she next comes home we can offload much of her music and back things up just in case. Problem was when the machine strated freezing I couldn't run things like defrag or Adaware which I knew would help.

*Cheeky asking I know but this hard drive has some bugs and possibly a Trojan virus (Norton sometimes picks one up). Once i have removed the stuff I want from disc can I just delete the rest and hope that clears the bugs out or do I have to reformat or something? I have a feeling that some files won't let me delete??

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

If the machine you are using is virus free, then you can clear the contents of the external disk by doing the following:

Delete the partition completely. Then create a new NTFS partition and start afresh from there. You can do this in computer management > Disk Manager with the Administrative tools.

Failing that, there are lots of good disk management programs out there

If you do not have faith in the machine you are using to access the external hard drive, then things become more complicated.

David Lock

Thanks Luminous. Yes the machine I am using is brand new. My old one packed up and I asked for the hard drive to be removed and put in a case. Trouble was the old drive had some bugs which my old version of Norton had not picked up (and Trevor managed to disable Norton but that's another chapter in the story ).

Where would I find computer management on Windowas XP? I have looked through programmes inclding system tools but drawn a blank. david

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

Sorry, I was not sure how much assistance you would need - so I did not give much away with previous post

As an aside, Norton is pretty rubbish, there are better free options. AVG antivirus by Grisoft is free and better at scanning that Norton. There is a free version here: http://free.grisoft.com/freeweb.php/doc/2/


Now, onto the HDD Microsoft seem to hide any useful tools when it comes to XP, so here is how to unviel the ones you need. (There are even more tools that never get a menu item, and I can never remember the command lines to get the running... )

1) Right click the Start menu, select Properties
2) Start Menu > Customise > Advanced Scroll down to the bottom, you will see somthing about System Administrative Tools. Tick to show this on the start menu (or wherever you wish it to be).
3) Now click OK, and re-open up the start menu to naviagte to the admin tools

Make sure that you have your external drive powered up before opening up computer management. Now you should be able to follow the steps above to get to the disk manager.

The disk manager will show you a pretty pic of your HDDs. Find the right one, delete the partition and then create a new one It should be that simple, lets just hope so

David Lock

thanks - will have a go in the morning and get back as required. And yes I need all the help I can get! This section frightens me a bit

Foot_Tapper

Just to add to Luminous efforts without getting in his way

attach your external drive
Right click the "my computer" icon on your desktop/ select "manage"
you will see all the 3 sections :- system tools,storage and service and aplications.
select/ go into the storage section, then disk management.

Your drives will be in the right hand, top section.
right click on the external drive, you will see several options.
You could either go for "format" or "delete partition".
If you had various problems with it, I would most likely go for the latter.
Then re-create the partition, followed by an NTFS format. Should be ready to copy to then.

which windows operating system does your daughter have on her laptop btw ?
If anything other than 2K or XP, it will have a bearing on how you format the external drive. If it is one of them, when you format, do as luminous says and use NTFS

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

Yeah, that would be a faster way to get into computer management

(I always forget about that way )

David Lock

attach your external drive
Right click the "my computer" icon on your desktop/ select "manage"
you will see all the 3 sections :- system tools,storage and service and aplications.
select/ go into the storage section, then disk management.

Your drives will be in the right hand, top section.
right click on the external drive, you will see several options.
You could either go for "format" or "delete partition".
If you had various problems with it, I would most likely go for the latter.

OK THAT SHOULD BE WITHIN MY CAPABILITIES (JUST!)

Then re-create the partition, followed by an NTFS format.

CAN YOU EXPAND ON THAT BIT OR WILL IT BE OBVIOUS WHEN I GET TO THAT POINT?

Should be ready to copy to then.


Sorry about caps btw. Can you explain this. If I select external drive and run Norton it shows a few adaware type threats and sometimes a Trojan virus. However if I go into drive, Select All, and then right click and scan with Norton nothing shows up?? I did this to try and identify dodgy files.

Daughter's laptop uses XP (same as me). david

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

It will be obvious when you get to the correct bit

Things to note:-
1) Make sure that you have copied any of the info you want from your external drive. I'm sure we have covered this before, but this is now your last chance (without major hassle)
2) Make sure that you select the partition on the external drive. This is one of those things where you check, check again, and then finally check once more. Deleting the wrong partition will not be much fun (Windows should actually stop you deleting the wrong partition in your configuration, but lets not put it to the test)
3) To delete the partition - right click and select delete.
4) to create right click and select create
Personally I use a different piece of software to do this, so I am not certain what options it will give you. But if you ever want to use this newly formed partition in another computer as the main windows drive, you need to select the following options. If it does not let you select them, don't worry, it will do it automatically for you
a) File format is NTFS
b) You want a Primary partition rather than a logical one
c) You want the partition to be unhidden and assigned a drive letter (I'm sure it will not ask this and just do it for you)
d) You want the partition to be Active.

Where you are given the choice, choose the correct option from above. You really do not need to worry if it does not ask you, it will have selected the correct option. The software I use allows you do to other stuff that you are not interested in

Foot_Tapper

Dont think you need to make disk " active" do you, i thought it was only if you needed to make a disk bootable. May be wrong tho

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

I agree, but if he wants to use this drive in another machine as the windows boot drive I will need to be active. I don't think he will get this option anyway, am pretty sure Windows just sorts that one out for you