jack: (Default)
[personal profile] jack
My laptop has recently had problems starting up. It starts, but if you run more than one or two programs, they stop responding, in a fashion that makes me think of a computer out of memory.

I'm embarrassed because I'm a professional programmer, and yet I don't know everything about some obvious things like dealing with a normal home computer.

I'm buying a new laptop anyway, as this is quite old, but it would make sense to make it usable as well if I can.

What is most likely? The obvious suspects seem to be:

* Physical fault in memory or motherboard
* Hard disk too full or too fragmented
* Rootkit or other evil (I have AVG 2011, but I don't know if it woudl find everything)
* Accumulation of too much non-spyware crap that's installed and runs on startup

How can I most easily tell?

Date: 2011-04-09 01:50 am (UTC)
pseudomonas: My rat is confused by technology (technology)
From: [personal profile] pseudomonas
Spybot Search & Destroy has a great feature that lets you fiddle with what's launched on startup. I strongly recommend it even if you never use it to scan for spyware.

Also: boot off a Live CD. If you get the same sort of problems, it's likely to be hardware. Live CDs tend to come with memtest programs that'll give you a clue about if the memory is screwed.

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