Slow bootup, distorted sound/video playback

Winxp 1G ram, 160GB. What's wrong with my laptop? It takes like 5 minutes to boot up and the sound/video playback is horrible, its distorted even the startup sound, I saw a lot of people have this problem too. I can fix it with a system restore and I already have to do it 2 times already, I don't want to do a system restore every day?

 

For what it's worth I'm having a similar problem, started a week or so ago. Startup is much slower, it seems to startup then the whole screen blinks before starting up the last elements (network connections) Playback hesitates and sound is echo-ish. any clues?

I think transfer rates have dropped as well, 1GB in 10-12 minutes Ouch!

I need to take this thing with me to quick edit photos for a wedding I'm shooting.

 

First thing I would look for is spyware or ad ware. Then check for viruses. That is what I do when my wifes computer running XP slows down and it usually fixes the problem.

 

Any free program you can recommend? I have similar issues and I use AVG (free version). Is there something else to complement it.

 

AD aware for your spyware it is free. Window Washer for cleaning out your cache and so forth, it is not free but it is worth the money.

 

Have the same problem.
Works OK for about a week then slows down without reason, and also distorted sound/video.
But when look at CPU usage it is alway less then 50% occupied.
Scan with anti virus, malwarebyte and tuneup utilities and no viruses or trojans or any suspicious programs.
I have desktop computer which is almost half worse then this netbook (and works ok with lots programs on 512 MB on AMD 2000 Ghz)

Looks to me it has some problems with cashing, but CPU never goes over 50% so i have no idea.

 

Same here. It's annoying as hell, and I can't figure out what's wrong.
The sound is distorted (and sometimes the video output too, which makes videos completely unwatchable), it takes an eternity to boot and the system is generally slower than normal.
I've tried everything, reinstalling and updating drivers, flashing the bios and so on, but to no avail. I also think it's a caching problem, as the processor isn't even at half load while playing sounds.
This happened about a week or so ago, literally overnight, and I have no clue whatsoever why the system is going to a snail's pace all of a sudden.

Any ideas?

EDIT:
Fixed it. The problem was with the HDD.
I assume you all have normal HDDs and not SDDs, so here it goes: The HDD somehow switched itself from UDMA to PIO mode (which is waaaay slower than UDMA), so simply go to control panel -> system -> device manager -> IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers -> Primary IDE channel -> Advanced settings. If the HDD is in PIO mode, there's your problem. To fix this, go back to IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers and delete (yes, delete!) the Primary IDE channel. The system will prompt you to restart and subsequently reinstall the driver. And bam - there you are, with your Aspire One fast as ever.

kudos to the guys from this thread for that one.

Hope that helped.
And I hope some of the Asus guys read this and include it in their FAQ section on their site, this took me ages to find out... and the HDD was one of the last suspects I had in mind.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year everyone!

 

Awesome post regarding the HDD. I'll try it as soon as I get home. Do you know what caused it to switch to the other mode?

 

Yup this was the problem. Corrected, like suggested above.
Thanx
Merry Christmas and happy New Year to all

 

I had this problem as well, overnight.
Thank you so much for posting this fix!

 

I shall worship you as a god for rest of my life!!! Had the same problem for 2 months and couldnt figure out what is the problem! Overnight my one went from shooting star to a snail and i could barely open my photoshop. I tried ALL possible virus scanners for trojans, malwares, etc. and nothing helped. Doing this fixed ALL the problems at once...

Thanks!!!

 

Mate, no words to explain my gratitude; Its works really good!

 

I can't express my gratitude enough for that posting Zylix. As the others said it just seemed to happen over night. bizarre. Thanks again

 

My heartfelt thanks!
i've been noticing my AAO has been running slower and slower. I thought it might be something like a virus - and finally took the few hours necessary to run a deep scan on the system. Shockingly clean I thought there might be some hardware issue or overheating.
I finally started searching and found the mention of the PIO IDE issue .. but I've always been reluctant to make "unknown" changes to my system. I did more research and found these forums and signed up.

I noticed the change immediately upon rebooting. What a huge difference! Finally my system is running like it should.

Thank you so very much!

 

Nice post guys, this is the second time this forum saved my shiny netbook.

Thanks a lot!

 

I couldn't figure out why boot time went from 45 secs to 3 minutes plus another 3 minutes of slow performance. Firefox took 3 minutes to start and everything was just slow. I ran check disk under windows and the full option under DOS. It found nothing although it seems to hang at time and took 6-24 hours just to scan. Ran AVG and Malwarebytes and it found nothing. I started to blame the latest XP update until I check the forum. Sure enough it was the PIO mode. Now it's running better than new or it seems that way after having to deal with PIO mode the last 4 days.

Thank you and make this thread a sticky. Boot time is back to 45 secs again and every thing is just faster.