Hi all! I have been meaning to join the ranks here for a long time but I guess life just gets in the way. I have joined on not so happy terms though. Here's my problem.
On my parents just-over 1 year old HP desktop, everything will run fine. Then out of no-where, it slows to a crawl. And I am talking like 30s - 1m or more to do anything. Open chrome, IE, or even make a little animation when you move the mouse over something (like the little box when you move over an icon). Sometimes I can click the little desktop button on the bottom right, but normally it doesn't work. Normally I just walk away and come back in 5 minutes. Then it's fine for another hour and it does it again. It could last anywhere from 5 minutes to 30.
Super important background info:
I just finished a huge dispute with HP over this stupid thing a month ago. Long story short the hard drive died (not totally dead but would randomly shut down and you could hear it grind to a stop). I replaced it myself with another cheapo Hitachi they sent me.
On the original hard drive Windows would randomly freeze up completely. The mouse still moved but I had to either reboot or log into another user account (Thank GOD I had one). It was like i was looking at a picture of my screen. Except for the mouse, nothing worked at all, no buttons, icons, etc.
I did a disk image in a desperate attempt to save our 30,000 family photos, which Windows scattered all over the place. The pictures are EVERYWHERE and I was afraid I would miss some.
Actually, first I bought a NAS drive that windows wouldn't let me back up to without buying Professional, then my 100MB recovery partition had less than 40mb of free space and I can't resize it so I couldn't back up to the new USB external. Eventually my dad bought the upgraded Carbonite ripoff package for $300 and that finally backed everything up.
So Carbonite uploaded the cloud files (NOT disk image, I will explain) to the hard drive, hereby known as HD2 (Hard Drive 2).
Because THAT one screwed up to. I called HP and blah blah blah give me the runaround and finally they told me I was out of warranty since like 2008. First of all you people sent me a hard drive last week, covered by warranty. Second of all the faulty original drive clearly says "MANUFACTURED FEB 2012"
So we get HD3 in (called Canadian offices and finally got someone who spoke English) and long story short I'm done with HP. I get HD2 up and running and I am using it now. HD3 is still unused and I am planning on reloading the disk image to it at some point, eventually using HD2 and HD3 in RAID in case one fails. (when they fail)
So I am running HD 2. I know this is a software issue.
I have tried the following:
De-frag - Seemed to work for the rest of the day but obviously didn't.
HP BIOS checks - HD 2 is good.
Virus checks - No viruses. We scan almost everyday now. Every couple of days we get 1 or 2. We use AVG free, Malwarebytes, and Defender (useless).
Hardware Test - Ran Ubuntu off a disk. Worked awesome. Nothing wrong with any hardware as far as I could tell.
Boot-Up Programs - It's 3 AM. I have no idea what these are called. I would any other time. I did not clean the registry as the programs supposedly do this but the programs on startup I went through and stopped.
Check Task Manager Processes - Nothing suspicious here. I can't pull up task manager when a "flash-freeze" hits though.
So I am 99% sure this is software and that Carbonite carried it over. It will also be on the disk image in that case. I believe that it is some form of the total-freeze that was on the original hard drive.
So what do I do? Thanks for the help in advance! And God Bless!
P.S. I am extremely tech-savvy so don't hold back on recommendations. I am currently learning C++ and will be learning Batch Terminal programming in a few days.
....I just need to build them a PC and be done for a few years...
On my parents just-over 1 year old HP desktop, everything will run fine. Then out of no-where, it slows to a crawl. And I am talking like 30s - 1m or more to do anything. Open chrome, IE, or even make a little animation when you move the mouse over something (like the little box when you move over an icon). Sometimes I can click the little desktop button on the bottom right, but normally it doesn't work. Normally I just walk away and come back in 5 minutes. Then it's fine for another hour and it does it again. It could last anywhere from 5 minutes to 30.
Super important background info:
I just finished a huge dispute with HP over this stupid thing a month ago. Long story short the hard drive died (not totally dead but would randomly shut down and you could hear it grind to a stop). I replaced it myself with another cheapo Hitachi they sent me.
On the original hard drive Windows would randomly freeze up completely. The mouse still moved but I had to either reboot or log into another user account (Thank GOD I had one). It was like i was looking at a picture of my screen. Except for the mouse, nothing worked at all, no buttons, icons, etc.
I did a disk image in a desperate attempt to save our 30,000 family photos, which Windows scattered all over the place. The pictures are EVERYWHERE and I was afraid I would miss some.
Actually, first I bought a NAS drive that windows wouldn't let me back up to without buying Professional, then my 100MB recovery partition had less than 40mb of free space and I can't resize it so I couldn't back up to the new USB external. Eventually my dad bought the upgraded Carbonite ripoff package for $300 and that finally backed everything up.
So Carbonite uploaded the cloud files (NOT disk image, I will explain) to the hard drive, hereby known as HD2 (Hard Drive 2).
Because THAT one screwed up to. I called HP and blah blah blah give me the runaround and finally they told me I was out of warranty since like 2008. First of all you people sent me a hard drive last week, covered by warranty. Second of all the faulty original drive clearly says "MANUFACTURED FEB 2012"
So we get HD3 in (called Canadian offices and finally got someone who spoke English) and long story short I'm done with HP. I get HD2 up and running and I am using it now. HD3 is still unused and I am planning on reloading the disk image to it at some point, eventually using HD2 and HD3 in RAID in case one fails. (when they fail)
So I am running HD 2. I know this is a software issue.
I have tried the following:
De-frag - Seemed to work for the rest of the day but obviously didn't.
HP BIOS checks - HD 2 is good.
Virus checks - No viruses. We scan almost everyday now. Every couple of days we get 1 or 2. We use AVG free, Malwarebytes, and Defender (useless).
Hardware Test - Ran Ubuntu off a disk. Worked awesome. Nothing wrong with any hardware as far as I could tell.
Boot-Up Programs - It's 3 AM. I have no idea what these are called. I would any other time. I did not clean the registry as the programs supposedly do this but the programs on startup I went through and stopped.
Check Task Manager Processes - Nothing suspicious here. I can't pull up task manager when a "flash-freeze" hits though.
So I am 99% sure this is software and that Carbonite carried it over. It will also be on the disk image in that case. I believe that it is some form of the total-freeze that was on the original hard drive.
So what do I do? Thanks for the help in advance! And God Bless!
P.S. I am extremely tech-savvy so don't hold back on recommendations. I am currently learning C++ and will be learning Batch Terminal programming in a few days.
....I just need to build them a PC and be done for a few years...
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