🔒 Locked

Laptop problems

Started by gavco98 Oct 12, 2006 at 4:22 AM 3 replies 550+ views

Original Post

141

Oct 12, 2006 at 4:22 AM

Im trying to fix a laptop for a friend, but im a little lost. Its a 250mhz / 128mb fujitsu laptop, running windows 98. It was having trouble booting, so reformatted. The laptop is running extremely slowly however, it took almost 10 hours to reload windows! The install went without a hitch, albeit slowly. Upon booting, the machine takes a long time to boot, probably about 5 minutes. When windows loads, a popup window appears welcoming you to windows, and asking you to take a tour (i think?). As soon as this window appears, the laptop locks up and needs to be rebooted. I can get into safe mode no bother, however again it takes a while to load, and runs quite slowly. I notice in safe mode that the hard-disks are running in "mS-DOS compatibility mode" and are listed as FIFO, despite being IDE. I checked fujitsu website and found a few patches for windows 98, however the machine has no floppy drive, and the CD drive is not appearing under safe mode. Hopefully if I can get into windows 98 i can access the cd drive, so my question to you is, how do i stop this window poping up and crashing the system? Presumeably there is a registry key somewhere that says whether you have dismissed the window or not yet? Also, any idea why the machine is running so damn slow, will installing these patches cure that? Oh, I also tried booting from a DSL Linux CD, and after about 5 mins only about 5 lines of text had appeared on the screen, by which time I gave up, so its just as slow as windows..... Any thoughts?

AnonymousPosterChild

145

AnonymousPosterChild

Oct 12, 2006 at 4:27 AM

Honestly, at the age of the laptop, you're probably dealing with a LOT of potential hardware failures all occuring at once. From the description of some of your problems, however, your most likely bet would be a harddrive failure, or even a controller failure. If its the HDD, its just a matter of finding a compatible drive, but if the controller is going, or really, anything else, you're boned.

owl

267

owl

Oct 12, 2006 at 4:45 AM

if there is an option, try reseting the bios. Just in case.

I don't think any patch for win98 will solve this problem. The computer goes slow before loading win98.

Ravuya

296

Ravuya

Oct 12, 2006 at 7:54 AM

If the hard drive is going to PIO mode before the machine even boots up, the hard drive or its related cables are damaged, which is to be expected for a machine of that age. You will have to replace them.

Also run memtest86 while you're at it to make sure the DRAM hasn't gone bad. It shouldn't have, but you never know; might fix your crashes.

Patches won't help.

Michalson

177

Michalson

Oct 12, 2006 at 9:14 AM

Almost certainly harddrive problem.

Either the harddrive itself is going (very, very likely), or there is a problem with the IDE interface (less likely). I have a PIII 800mhz/256MB laptop with the same issue, the harddrive is worn out (it's on its 2nd harddrive), resulting in everything going really slowly. Deleting a text file can take a minute.

It sounds like the harddrive is either developing bad sectors, or the FAT has been screwed up (likely due to the computer being turned off while writing to disk because the system didn't appear to be responding).

I'd try running a disk scan (which will likely take forever, leave it running overnight). Unless you can make some progress there it's probably a junker - getting a new harddrive likely won't work because the BIOS won't recognize a 8GB+ drive, and they're won't be a BIOS update to fix it.

If such an outdated laptop is useful, you could easily buy an insanely cheap brand new celeron laptop for $400. (i.e 1.2Ghz celeron, 14" screen, 256mb, 40GB, CDRW)

Topic Locked

This topic has been locked by a moderator. New replies are not allowed.