Okay, so I see a great number of computer issues, and most of them I'm able to work through or recognize with general ease. Some of them I run past you good people here, such as this one:

I have a user with a fairly recent Dell laptop. The behavior it's exhibiting makes no sense to me, and I'll see if I can explain it. Essentially, the performance works like a coasting car. The car starts out at the top of a hill, the hits a flat stretch at the bottom where it slowly slows down and eventually stops.

That's exactly like what's happening with this computer. It starts out running just like a computer of its type should. I'm able to run applications, browse the web, etc. But no matter what program I'm running, eventually the laptop will start getting slow then eventually grind to an utter halt. Sometimes I'm able to restart the computer, but most of the time I'm left not being able to do any thing but move the mouse around.

This might help: the same thing happens when running chkdsk /r. Of sfc /scannow. In each case, it starts slowing then grinds to a halt.

What's the deal? Any potential suspects (besides being a Dell laptop, I mean)?

Gremlins.

It's on the wing! er...hard drive!

How long does it take? If you boot the laptop with a Linux LiveCD, and run for the same amount of time, does the same thing happen (which might point to a hardware issue)?

It's Windows. When in doubt, reinstall. And since it's a Dell, it's probably got a cheap-ass hard drive. When in doubt, replace.

+1

Could the CPU be over heating and shutting down?
Ditto on a dying hard drive, but I'd expect that not to have the costing effect you describe.

+2

And use smartctl from the Linux system to read the S.M.A.R.T. logs from the hard drive. Also perhaps run sensors so you can monitor the CPU and drive temperatures etc.. while waiting for it to fail.

You can try to get the bootable Dell Diag disk for the laptop and run the system tester on it or you can try using something like StressLinux or Hiren's BootCD. Hiren's help me find a faulty videocard in a PC a few months ago. The machine would work fine for weeks and then some days it would crash multiple times a day. I also found some other bootable system testers but I can't find the downloads now.

Thanks, guys. Which bootable Linux distro do you recommend? The only one I can remember using is Knoppix, I think.

And Attack, I've heard of Hiren's, but when I go to that page you link to I can't for the life of me find out how to actually download it! It's basically just a long page of text with no links anywhere...

UNetbootin is a very cool application that has the option to download several different Linux distros and make a Bootable Live USB drive. You will want to pick the live versions of whatever distro you want to try.

It is very odd that they don't have a DL link on the site. This was the second link when I googled for "Hiren's BootCD 15.1" http://www.softexia.com/hirens-bootcd.html

Turns out my "faulty videocard" was an overloaded PSU. Just sayin'.

This sounds like a dead cpu fan, I've had Dells do this before.

Knoppix is still around, but now-a-days, pretty much every distro has a LiveCD version. Ubuntu or Mint would be fine, but since the goal is just something to test with and not install permanently, even Damn Small Linux would be sufficient -- I'm just not sure if the tools Mark suggests are on it by default.

The advantage of say, a Ubuntu Live CD, is that the package manager is also "live", so any needed tools (smartmontools, lm-sensors) are just a few clicks away.

If the system stays alive that long.

Yeah, I had already tried replacing the PSU before I figured out it was the videocard. The videocard even caused a different machine to lockup when running the test software I had found.

Okay, I have no idea what this result means...

I have an Ubuntu live USB drive installed with smartmontools (sort of... I thought it would install to the USB drive, but it disappears when I restart). Anyway, I ran the short test and everything seemed to come back fine, then I ran the long test and now it's sitting at 90% completion, but with 0 seconds to go... I have no idea what it's doing. But in the case it's not frozen up I don't think. I can do other stuff on the computer without any problems, it just doesn't look like the test is finishing.

What other tests should I run?

Here's the output I have so far, and I'm not sure what I'm looking for in all this information.

Correction...I let the test run its course, and sometime between my last post and now it finally completed with the following message in GSmartControl, which I used because the command line test doesn't even let you know when it's truly done, it just works in the background:

Test result: Completed with read failure.
Check the Self-test Log for more information.

I have attached that log.

You've got a bad drive. RMA it.

Thanks, Bitt. What does this error mean? That it couldn't read the drive at all? Then how does Windows boot up to begin with?

Sorry, I'm just curious how to read these results...

It doesn't really make any difference. The issue is that the drive itself is performing the test and it reported a failure.

5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct .. 82

Eighty-two bad sectors and counting.. RMA it.