My FAIL of the year

[citizensmith]

A bit of a rant from me - and amusement for you


A Compaq CQ58 - Win8.1 AMD 1400 2MB - a QVC "special" comes in. "It goes realy slow - can you fix it?" .

How hard can it be? Takes 10 mins to load Desktop - Quick check - Kaspersky OK, MBAM OK, Autoruns OKish - It really is sluggish so time to add some RAM - The shutdown is interupted by Skype just starting up





Add 4Mb - still is very slow - check that drive with HD Tune



That ca'nt be right ? Swap out mem for new sticks - retest




Better ? I don;t think so. Take a new fresh 500mb drive and reload using the 5 recovery disks. It takes 4 hours to complete! The OOBE is fine though - no waiting for things to happen - add test user with MS account OK. First time boot to desktop and its' treacle time again

Another new 4Mb stick -



Max mem of 2x 4Mb





The drive works perfectly in another PC. The memory is okay to. There are no options in BIOS beyond Boot / UEFI choices.Tried some PE disks -~20 mins to desktop Giving it back to customer tomorrow with original drive - I have no ideas at all. And to be honest - I don;t want to fix it anymore.
If its the CPU too bad - I don;t change those - my loss. Really want to toss it into the skip - how can they sell such under specced dross?

sorry about the pics.

 

[Markverhyden]

LOL!!! Sorry, not laughing at you. Reminds me of this customer the other day who had a Gateway with an AMD and Vista, complaining about how slow it is. Cheap machines do not last. Had a long conversation about how the best thing to do is buy a business level machine.

 

[gikstar]

Here is the problem:
AMD E1-1200 APU Speed = 692
about equivalent to a:
Intel Pentium D 940 @ 3.20GHz Speed = 712
Taken from an older saved copy, from: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/

I keep a spreadsheet copied from: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
so that I can keep track of what I need to upgrade a system to to get better performance. It's a good selling point and it keeps me from purchased used 'junk' that's not worth fixing.

Those AMDs are terrible and the Intel Atom processors aren't any better, unless the computer is being used as a firewall and then it questionable for that also. Paperweight or doorstop computers, your choice. I wouldn't even give one of those computers away if it had that AMD processor

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

Well you can see in the first shot there is something slowing the drive quite a bit, perhaps a process using up that weak cpu I dunno. The access time is all over the place.

The 2nd screenshot looks significantly better but the boot time didn't improve? Where was majority of the boot time at? Was it before the welcome screen where its just the windows logo and the loading indicator?

 

[Mick]

Probably wouldn't help, but have you tried Soluto?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

A Compaq CQ58 - Win8.1 AMD 1400 2MB - a QVC "special" comes in. "It goes realy slow - can you fix it?" .

so time to add some RAM - The shutdown is interupted by Skype just starting up

Add 4Mb - still is very slow -

Another new 4Mb stick -

Max mem of 2x 4Mb

Windows 3 ran OK on 2MB of RAM.
But once Windows 95 came out...you really wanted over 4 megs of RAM, better yet..8.
But after that...Win98..16 megs, 2K...at least 128 megs, WinXP..couple of gigs, Win7 and on up...you really need at least 4 gigs to have it move partially OK, but ideally 8 gigs. Not 2 MB..or 4 or 8 MB....but 8 GB.

OK...OK..you meant gigabytes....not megabytes.

That hard drive is a 5,400 rpm turd of a slow hard drive. Instead of a 7,200rpm drive. There's a major cause of slowness.
You said you replaced it..did you at least up it to a 7,200 rpm drive? Client probably won't pay for an SSD...but going from 5,400rpm to 7,200rpm is still a big improvement.

But....you're left with that netbook class CPU...that AMD is like an Atom CPU. Ain't gonna move a full desktop OS (not to mention bloated Win8) very fast. It's worse than those old Intel Celerons.

Combine that netbook CPU, with a 5,400rpm drive, with inadequate amounts of RAM, with a super el cheapo motherboard chipset....yeah, you can watch trees grow faster than that thing will boot up.

 

[Porthos]

All the above comments are spot on. Stupid question but is the fan running and cleaned out? Over heating could be a factor.

 

[sapphirescales]

Any AMD processor in an OEM desktop or laptop is just asking for trouble. The only good AMD processors are in custom builds. But you've got the lowest of the low AMD in there. Even if you put 8GB of DDR3 1600Mhz memory and a Samsung 850 Pro SSD it would still crawl. If you did that you MIGHT be able to get it about as fast as an AMD a6 for basic tasks (browsing the net, etc.). But who's gonna pay $300 to upgrade a laptop that probably cost $300?

When a customer comes in with something like this, I take it in on trade and give them a good business class unit. If they can't afford much, I'll do an older Core 2 Duo system (it's still faster than this junk). Then I sell the hunk of trash they traded in on eBay to some other poor sap. Then said poor sap comes into one of your shops and hopefully you do the same thing. It's called the circle of "passing the crappy computer around the table until someone gets stuck with it."

 

[citizensmith]

Thanks guys appreciate the comments - I realy thought I could have fixed it. Another lesson learnd "check the specs next time". Turns out its only 6 month old so bloke hopes to exchange under QVC warranty.

"passing the crappy computer around the table until someone gets stuck with it."

LOL

 

[Porthos]

Turns out its only 6 month old so bloke hopes to exchange under QVC warranty.

Hopes he gets a better spec'ed one this time.

 

[Markverhyden]

Thanks guys appreciate the comments - I realy thought I could have fixed it. Another lesson learnd "check the specs next time". Turns out its only 6 month old so bloke hopes to exchange under QVC warranty.


LOL

And old turd for a new turd.... Yep, I can just see it. LOL!!!

 

[layoric]

The linux boot might have been slow because the optical drive was also a very low end one, or it also had problems. Unless you used a usb boot drive. Sometimes the issues are multiple which makes it harder to diagnose, especially on laptops.

 

[HFultzjr]

IMHO.

Upgrade the Ram.
Swap out for an SSD.
Optimize/configure.

Or, just get a decent computer.......LOL

 

[Altster]

Combine that netbook CPU, with a 5,400rpm drive, with inadequate amounts of RAM, with a super el cheapo motherboard chipset....yeah, you can watch trees grow faster than that thing will boot up.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA