Okay, so I'm working on this system for a friend of the family.
There were ALOT of things wrong with this... but that's besides the point. Basically, I'm trying to figure out why it's running so slow.
I've completely disassebled everything in the system, cleaned, dusted, reapplied thermal compound to every heat sink, etc... and completely wiped the hard drive to get ready for a clean install of 7.
BUT... when I boot from the installation media (either through DVD or USB), it takes WAY longer than I've ever seen ANY system to even boot into the install screen.
It's an older HP Pavilion a6518f. It's got an Athlon II x2 CPU with 3gb of DDR2 800... I've ran memtest, and the memory is fine, but still, this system is ridiculously slow.
Any suggestions? If anyone needs more info, please... feel free to ask.
I just wanted people to get the basic idea of what I'm dealing with.
Could it be the motherboard somehow?
I thought that maybe he had done some adjustments in the BIOS that he shouldn't have, but I've restored everything back to original default settings... and that didn't help either.
Please help. Thanks
There was a bug in Win7 early on (fixed with a patch earlier this year) where the CPU would get "stuck" at a slow speed, even when plugged into wall power. A number of my co-workers had this problem. I don't remember just off-hand what the patch was, but you should be able to find it on the MS web site. Also, get the CPUz tool (freeware). It will interrogate your system and tell you all about it, including what speed the CPU and bus are running. You can get it here: http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html
That's an odd one. The system was running Vista prior to me recieving it... do you think that same 'slow clock' problem happened with Vista? I'll have to check it out. I have used CPU-Z before, and I actually keep a copy of the install file on a thumb drive for these types of things. My problem was getting an operating system to even install... I started Win 7 Home Premuin 32 bit at around 4:30 this afternoon... it's now midnight, and it literally JUST loaded the desktop for the first time about 2 minutes ago. lol
Now i can try CPU-Z. Thanks for the tip.
As the system configuration is good, I suggest you to try booting with another disc. This might be a pirated copy of Windows disc.
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