Hi, so I have had my 700M for about 2 years now and it worked great, but a few weeks ago I tried watching a movie on it and the video card crashed. The screen went to the large resolution and so I restarted my computer thinking that maybe because it was on for 2 days something went wrong a reboot would fix that, and it did. I restarted, and there was a message from Windows saying that my computer just recovered from a major error, and I should update the driver for my video card. I went to the Dell's website and my driver was up to date. So I did nothing and everything has been working fine until about a week ago when my computer started to run slow, and heat up. Something was using my CPU but nothing showed up when i tried to look for the program through the task manager.I thought it was spyware so I ran an old version of Ad-Aware 6.0 just to do a regular scan and it froze up about half way through the scan, my CPU load was 100% the working light stayed on and I couldn't get the windows task manager open to cancel ad-aware, nor could I close ad-aware any other way. After 10min of waiting to see if the problem resolves itself i was forced to hold down the power button and shut the computer down manually. When it restarted it took about twice as long as normal to load. After that I ran an update on ad-aware and tried running it again. The same thing happened and I had to manually shut down my computer again. This time I uninstalled adaware and installed a new version of it. I ran it, it found some tracking cookies and other things, i used the clean up tool provided by adaware to get rid of those problems, and restarted my computer again. and the problem wasn't fixed, it stool took twice as long as normal to load. at this time i ran spybot search and destroy and it didn't find anything. I also ran my antivirus software, Norton 9 Corporate edition (i know it's a system hog but i got it for free) I am actually going to switch to AVG probably after I reformat. Anyway the scan took a really long time almost 2 hours and Norton found no viruses. I then did an online scan using Kaspersky AV and it found nothing as well and also took an unusually long time. So know i know it's not a virus or spyware. I then did a disk check, and that took a few hours to do and some errors were found, unfortunately i didn't write them down, and when it tried to fix the errors I don't think it was able to. I am away at school and have exams coming up so i couldn't waste anymore time trying to solve this problem, so I just tried to ignore it. But all of a sudden my CPU usage jumped to 100% i opened up the task manager and saw that the system idle was at about 50% and there was no one program that was using my CPU that much, but my computer started to heat up and so I had to do something, and I started closing down my programs one by one. Once I closed Utorrent my CPU usage went to normal, i then opened utorrent again and the CPU usage jumped up again but in the task manager it showed that utorrent was only using 15 to 30% of the CPU, the rest of the % went to system idle. So I shut down utorrent. a few days later I tried running utorrent again and it worked normally, using minimal CPU, and not causing my computer to heat up. But my computer is running really slow. It's taking atleast twice as long to boot up and a little longer to shut down. Also whenever i open programs like word or firefox the cpu usage would just to 100% for a few seconds and it would take a lot longer to load those applications. Also when I tried extracting files using WinRAR it would take at least three times longer and the CPU usage would be at 100%. Transfering files from one hard drive to my external would also take a lot longer. like i said i have exams and need to study so i ignored the problem for about a week, and today when I started my computer up it went into a a system scan that i didn't schedule but it said that it highly recommended that i do it, this was during the windows welcome screen. It ran the scan and deleted 3 files: ipodsettings.nib in index $I30, IpodSE~1.NIB in index $I30, and reg00480 in index $I30 of file 43237. It then went on to do some other system scan, everything else seemed normal. It then said that it's repairing the problem, and after a few min. the computer restarted. Now my system is still running slowly, and start up still slow but it seems that programs are loading a little bit faster, and fan is going on a little bit less.
Anyway what do you think is wrong with my system? I know it's not a virus or spyware because of the scans I ran, I also have never had spyware or a virus on this machine before. I don't randomly download stuff or surf the web that much. Also I am at school in the Caribbean and it's a 3rd world country with semi-unstable electricity, my computer is plugged into a pretty good surge protector at all times, but i see the lights dim every now and then. So do you think that this might be do to the electrical issue?? Could the hard disc errors that the system found be causing this problem? Will a reformat fix this problem?
Any advice or comments are appreciated. Thank you. Also my specs are below, I am using windows XP Pro, and my computer is undervolted with CHC .7V at 6X and 1.18V at 18X I have had it undervolted for about as long as I have owned the computer and this is the first real issue I have had with it.
Here's the list of my current processes.
thanks again.
Anyway what do you think is wrong with my system? I know it's not a virus or spyware because of the scans I ran, I also have never had spyware or a virus on this machine before. I don't randomly download stuff or surf the web that much. Also I am at school in the Caribbean and it's a 3rd world country with semi-unstable electricity, my computer is plugged into a pretty good surge protector at all times, but i see the lights dim every now and then. So do you think that this might be do to the electrical issue?? Could the hard disc errors that the system found be causing this problem? Will a reformat fix this problem?
Any advice or comments are appreciated. Thank you. Also my specs are below, I am using windows XP Pro, and my computer is undervolted with CHC .7V at 6X and 1.18V at 18X I have had it undervolted for about as long as I have owned the computer and this is the first real issue I have had with it.
Here's the list of my current processes.
thanks again.
