[Angel_Leaguer]

I have a Toshiba laptop that is 4 years old. It runs off Vista and a few months ago it started freezing once and awhile and running slow. I tried checking for updates and scanning for viruses but nothing came up positive. Then a couple of weeks ago it started getting really bad so I tried cleaning the hard drive and reloaded the start-up disk. I then went through the Windows updates and it worked great.... For about 2 days. Now we can't get through a couple of minutes of the web before it freezes. I tried updates but it freezes. I pulled the battery and have been running off from the plug. any suggestions would be very helpful... Otherwise this computer may be chucked off of my deck!!!!
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[jinxremoving]

If you wiped the hard drive and completely re-installed Vista and it's still randomly locking up then it sounds more like a hardware thing but just to confirm, you had to re-install all of your programs right? (I want to make sure you went through a full re-install and not just the repair feature of Vista which wouldn't help in this case if the laptop was slow due to software problems).

Assuming you did have to re-install everything then I would first consider replacing the hard drive. Usually with laptops the most common thing to go after general wear & tear (not dropping it...) is the hard drive. The reason I would suspect a hard drive is that it sounds like your drive has "bad sectors" and when Windows try's to write to a bad sector it can cause extreme slowness to a full lockup. Actually happened to me the other month with my Acer laptop. The good news is that you can get a cheap hard drive and they are very easy to install, it's literally a five minute job and hard to screw up.

YouTube Video:

The process is pretty similar for all laptops and will save you some money instead of paying a repair shop to do it. If you can get a hard drive with a return policy even better, that way you can return it if the problem comes back and it's obviously not the hard drive. Also make sure you get a laptop (2.5") hard drive, as they are smaller than a desktop hard drive.

 

[Angel_Leaguer]

Thanks!!! I thought maybe the hard drive but was not sure. I like the idea of doing it myself to save money. Also I did do a full clean of the hard drive, back to factory settings. Thankfully I have my phone to hold me over
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[irydehorses4lyfe]

Try running the disk defragment application on your computer if you haven't already. It sometimes helps fix slowness.
Your computer saves to wherever it finds free space on your hard drive and when you delete things it doesn't always remove EVERY single part of that saved item.