Old Laptop Harddisk

[oshta]

Ive got an old IBM thinkpag t30.

I only paid £45 for it about three years ago but its got a cracking keyboard, is fairly smaller yet useable, and still has decent battery life. The only down side is every now and then it just dips into a massive hdd access session and all grinds to a holt! Its running win xp and has 2x256mb of ram (512mb) and a 1,8ghz mobile p4 processor. It also has a comm port which i need for mapping the kitcars ignition and fueling.

Is it the hdd thats holding it back? And for £40 is it worth whacking a new one in it?

Current hdd
http://www.priorityelectronics.com/h...n040atcs04.htm

Possable cheapish replacement?
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/155940 (pdf spec sheet)



Daniel

[Tonka777]

Its not doing a scheduled virus scan or defrag is it?

[oshta]

Its not doing a scheduled virus scan or defrag is it?

No, its never just that long.
- Just every time you open a big folder, or open word, close a tab in opera, whatever, everything dies for about 60seconds of solid hdd noise. A window update does knock fair it out though!

There are no scheduled virus/defrag events. Although its not overly fragmented either as it gets the occasional run of O&O and not that much actual use.


Daniel

[GoNz0]

check the drives not in PIO mode, if its running in ultra DMA mode i would just format it and be done with.

[lazer]

Might be worth looking for a 2nd hand hard drive?

[oshta]

check the drives not in PIO mode

Thats a good, shout, i'll check.
- Its a fairly recently had fresh copy of windows put onto it.

If somone has a decent second hand drive knocking about thats an option, although £40 for a drive isnt going to break the bank. just no point if it wont improve it, clearly.


Daniel

[BobF64]

Its not something really simple such as its running low on physical ram and resorting to heavy use of the swap file?

[GoNz0]

get a smart tool to check its not about to fall over and die