[SOLVED] Windows 7 SO SLOW (suddenly)

Last week our brand new Dell workstation laptop (Precision M6500), became nearly unusable - very long lags when typing, rolling mouse over menu options, waiting for programs to load, waiting for menu options to activate, etc. There are moments of clarity, where the computer will behave normally, but these don't last more than a few minutes.

The problem corresponds with some hard crashes that we experienced -- we had been running some fairly intense renderings that day. Just to note, our old XP workstations with slower graphics cards, less RAM and slower processors, cannot run these renderings. We are not sure if the problem is related to these crashes, because it is possible that there was a "boiling of the frog" here, where perhaps the computer was gradually slowing down, finally reaching a tipping point where we just noticed last week.

I discovered the "Resource Monitor" and from that I think the problem is Disk Related because the disk is writing all the time (blue LED on front also goes solid quite frequently when computer is idle.) Also, the graph that shows disk queue length scales up to 5, 10, and 50 regularly. This is true even when running in Safe Mode with networking off. Both the blue and green lines on all disk graphs spike all over the place, again, while idle and while in use.

Here are the things that we have tried:
Clean reload of Nvidea graphics card driver
Updated and ran full scans with our Norton Anti-Virus
Used the "optimize performance" option in Norton
Defragged
Turned off automatic defragging
Ran Disk Check (no problem.)
Turned off Prefetch, ReadyBoot and Superfetch
Uninstalled unnecessary software
Uninstalled some necessary software, such as Norton and Adobe Suite 5.0
Called Dell, and ran their hardware diagnostics while on the phone (again no problem)

Next I am going to run a check of the operating system with the install disk, and if that doesn't work, I'll reload Windows 7. Before I do that, thought, I was wondering if anyone here had any other ideas? One thing I read somewhere was that someone had found their computer was writing millions of errors somewhere in an infinite loop. Once they found that and reset the program that writes the error message, problem solved. That sounds like a potential culprit, where our hard crashes maybe could have set something like that off. I don't know how to look for that, though.

One other note - when we ran the Norton optimize option, I had the performance monitor going, and the graphs started to look "normal" to my eye. The computer seemed fixed after, but it only lasted about 5 or 10 minutes.

Thanks for any help!
Wendie

Can we get your system specs so we know what hardware we are dealing with?

Thanks!

Here are specs:

Dell Precision M6500 preloaded with Windows 7 Professional, 64-bit
Intel Core i7 CPU Q740 1.73 Ghz
4GB RAM
Toshiba MK5056GYF HD (500GB SATA/300 7200RPM 16MB according to google)
HD configured as RAID
NVIDIA Quadro FX3800M

Addendum: Another thing we tried was to restore operating system one week. When that didn't work we went 2 weeks back.

I would re-install the RAID driver as this does sound HD related. Go to the mfr's web site and get the most recent driver available. If there are no win 7 drivers you can use an earlier driver by installing it in "compatibility" mode.
(to install in compat mode>>right click the installer>properties>compatibility>chose correct OS)

I searched Toshiba's US, Australian and European sites, and could find no drivers. The driver currently installed is Microsoft's 6.1.7600.16385, dated 6/21/2006. I tried to update by selecting the drive in devices and picking "update driver." I let it search for latest driver, but Windows said I had the latest. So then I uninstalled the driver and rebooted, forcing it to reinstall. Problem not fixed. Then I tried to reinstall the driver by inserting the OS disk I got with the computer, and searching the disk to find driver. It wouldn't let me install (if there is a driver file on the cd) saying "Windows has determined that the latest driver is already installed."

??

Also, I tried to download the current driver from Microsoft's web site, in case the driver file I have is corrupt, but I couldn't find anywhere to download it.

Default setting in the BIOS for the hard drive is RAID, but that really doesn't make any sense if you only have one hard drive. The better setting would be to change it to AHCI setting which WILL improve the hard drive's response times.

MS has a default driver for the AHCI setting but it's best to use the INTEL drivers for that setup. You'll need to install the INTEL RST drivers for the Intel PM55 Chipset.

Go here to download the RST Drivers: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=20215⟨=eng&wapkw=pm55%20chipset

Is that something I can do without reloading the operating system/all current files? or will it format the drive? (I am trying to limit what I try to non-catastrophic things as I need it running, even limping like this, while I finish up some stuff this week.)

Thank you!
Wendie

If you want to change 7 from RAID to AHCI, all you need to do before you change the BIOS setting is look in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci and change the 'Start' key to 0. (If an AHCI driver has never run on this machine it's probably 3.) The first time the machine boots in an AHCI controller mode it should load the default AHCI driver properly and prompt for a reboot.

You should be dealing with Dell tech support. There is no reason a brand new computer should need drivers reinstalled.