Laptop on constant load.

[sulretal]

Hey,
A Compaq nc6000(1 gig ram, 1.67ghz p4m, windows XP Home, 40 gig HD) that I own suddenly started acting strange. It constantly loads( I can tell beacuse the load light is a constant green) from the initial boot up of the laptop till I have to force shut it down by holding in the power button. Using CTRL+ALT+DELETE I notice the only running process using CPU power is System Idle Process, which I am assuming is a Windows Component. Anyway, if I end that process my pc shuts down so I can't do that.

I really have no idea what's happening, I use AVG Free edition virus scanner and scan my laptop every day for viruses, also I use Windows Defender and Windows firewall. Still have about 12 gigabytes of free harddrive space so I'm not sure if that would be a problem.

Thanks,

[thideras]

It might be just indexing your drive, let it sit for a couple hours and see if it stops. It could also be system restore making a backup :)

If you want, download "HiJackThis" and post the log in this thread.

[sulretal]

Hey Thideras,

An update, I left my pc on to see if it would stop, well I got a Windows Blue Screen error. I wish I would've taken a picture but it said something about a Page_Kernal. Also, the harddrive started making an odd clicking sound.

So I restart by a force shutdown. As it's booting it say there is a disk read error. Before when this statement would come up, I'd just shut off my pc and check to see if my harddrive was securely in it's slot. So I checked, and it was.

I restart again and now I keep getting this "Disk read error, press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to restart," message.

Oh dear.

[thideras]

Well, bad news then.

Clicking is a sure sign of a drive on its way out. I recently had a laptop that was brought to me that did the same thing. It took a long time to load and it was always reading from the HDD. After about 10 minutes of working on it, it started clicking (clicking of death :().

That drive is either very close to dying or dead, especially if the BIOS is telling you disk read error. I'd let that system sit for awhile and see if you can get it to boot up so you can pull files you need off of it. If you don't need any, just send the laptop in if it is under warranty. If it isn't under warranty, look at getting a replacement drive.

Sorry to tell you the bad news :(

[sulretal]

Bought the laptop from the classifieds so there is no warranty. I will keep trying to start it up so I can extract my files, I purchased a few albums on iTunes that I never had a chance to duplicate to my external.

Oh well, figured it wouldn't last forever, thanks for the input. I'll see about ordering a new one in the next few weeks.