Windows running very sluggish, any suggestions?

Usually I can fix these things on my own, but this one has got me stumped. A friend of my dad's dropped of his laptop (Dell 600m, centrino 1400mhz, 512ram) complaining that it was running slow. I turned it on, noticing that it booted very quickly and seemed to be running smooth enough. I only noticed the slowness when I went to open the system properties window, which took at least a minute to open, during which the computer was still responsive. In fact I thought maybe I had "missed" and clicked again, but then a long while later the window finally popped up. The same thing happens with any windows I try to open, and occasionaly the start menu.

This is very curious, as both the CPU and RAM are hardly being used, and there are still 20gb of free HD space. Right now I am defragging it, but if anyone knows what else it could be, feel free to comment!

What is running process wise?
And run a virus scan.

heat issues - bad HD -

is it possible to do a fresh format of it?

the guy is an architect and has lots of CAD drawings on it, but I can probably get him to come over and back up what he needs.

I thought of bad HD... but how could I tell?

I'll do a virus scan now, but there aren't any funky processes running as far as I could tell

SpaceyWilly said:

I'll do a virus scan now, but there aren't any funky processes running as far as I could tell

Click to expand...

bring up owner(Username), CPU usage, memory usage(peak and current) and base priority in taks manager's Processes tab. And post a screenie, if you can.

check dust in the heatsink, dell laptops more than others seem to clog VERY fast.

thats just my experience.

My guess is that the hd is going. I see this alot, it starts out as worse and worse seek times then eventually starts to bsod randomly then eventually files turn up missing. back up the data first then try tooling around with it. make sure the client also has a system for backing up important data as well for future use.