I recently got around to trying to get my sisters old laptop to start working again but Im having a bit of trouble finding out the problem.

Its a near 4 year old HP Pavilion ZE1115. The specs, as far as I can remember include a 1.1ghz Duron, 20 gig WD HDD [5400 possibly] and 256MB of PC133. She first started having problems with it when she first got it. It would only show half of the full 1.1ghz in the System Properties and always seemed to be sluggishly slow on absolutely everything.

The same applies today.. it takes ages for the thing to boot up and shut down, tasks and active windows become unresponsive for about 5 minutes until they unfreeze and is just plain slow in every way. I reformatted the drive and tried reinstalling Windows XP earlier and the installation just plain stopped and got stuck on 36%, even when those lame "Welcome to Windows" description screens kept cycling over and over and over. I even rebooted and it still got stuck at 36 or 37%. The "CDrom access" light wasnt flashing at all either.

What is the most logical problem here? Possibly a bad hard drive since everything is slow? Bad memory since not more than one thing can happen before the system bogs down? The CPU since it usually only shows ~500mhz in the System Properties window?

Any suggestions are more than welcome...

I'd suggest a complete reformat, then try to load a Linux distro on it. That way you can probably figure out what the problem is. If it doesn't load, then it could be either the HD or CD. If it does load, then you should be able to see what the CPU speed is showing (on first boot it should also show the CPU speed that's detected when the BIOS is loading).

Alternatively, you might be able to get ahold of a Win98 disk and try to install it. Beyond that, if XP won't even install, I can't think of much else to do besides use it as a paperweight or donate it.

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Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

If the System Properties is only showing it at 500Mhz and it's a 1 GHz Duron you definitely have a problem that might be able to be resolved in the BIOS if you feel comfortable going in there. Something is underclocking the processor. Try crystal's suggestion (minus the Linux bit) and if you feel comfortable looking into the BIOS I'd check to see if everything looks fine. Also try setting it to use Default Performance Options in the BIOS.

Yeah, cuz trying to install a different OS won't tell you anything. The whole point of it was to try something different to determine whether the CD is bad, the drive is bad, or if Windows itself just has a problem w/ the computer.

It's part of a diagnostics routine that I've developed because I have run into computers that, for some reason, don't work well w/ Windows. Because Linux has many drivers included w/ it, you don't have to first install the OS then try to install a driver; if the Linux install doesn't work, it will normally tell you there's a problem during the install. And since Linux is designed to run on old hardware, it's more likely not to have problems w/ a given system.

For example, I have an older Sony laptop that has wireless issues. When using it under Windows with a wireless PC Card installed, the system will lock up. I tried updating the drivers, removing and reinstalling the drivers, and even had the card itself repaired by the manufacturer. This led me to believe it was a Windows problem, especially since it worked for several years w/o a problem and died shortly after installing SP2.

Because I couldn't diagnose the problem within Windows due to the system locking up every 2 minutes, I installed Linux. From this I was able to determine that the PC Card hardware connector itself is the problem, because Linux couldn't even detect the card. (Actually it detected it once and installed it correctly. Upon reboot the card disappeared even though I didn't touch it.)

So, take it for what it's worth. Use every tool available and don't artifically handicap yourself; life is difficult enough already.

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Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

I have had a similar experience. While I had been attempting to overclock my processor AMD Athlon 3700 I fried the motherboard. Upon destroying my motherboard I replaced it. When I booted my pc up everything was slow as ****. When I boot windows theres a CPU monitor that automatically runs and it claimed the CPU was running half the norm speed. The first thing I did was go to BIOS and sure enough the new motherboard was underclocking the processor. Your best bet is to check your BIOS.

goodluck