VGN-FE31Z really slow??!

[mediamark]

Hi folks

My Vaio has been acting really slowly over recent months.
The DVD drive fails to recognize discs, including the driver disc that came with the Vista up-grade, which it didn't previously.

Applications take an age to open, they act erratically and occasionally shut down.
I've re-formatted it twice in the last few weeks and regularly scan for viruses, of which I've found none.

I defrag frequently and run CCleaner and Tune-up utilities for good measure all of which don't seem to help.

Is this likely to be hardware failure or something else?

Any suggestions would be greatly received. It's driving me crackers!!!

Ta!

[Blencogo]

So are you running Vista or XP now? I assume XP if the system cannot read the Vista Upgrade disc.

It is unlikely that hardware is causing your Vaio to run slowly unless your CPU is not working at 100% or your Hard Drive is set to PIO mode instead of UDMA.

Does the DVD drive recognise some discs or no discs at all?

If you have reformatted and reinstalled there is little else you can do except to look at the applications you are running and at any software you have added after the recovery.

First Rule - If you are using Norton - then get rid of it!!!! It uses far too much system resource and is particularly useless if you have MS Office installed as it wants to check every file before opening it.

Do you have any Vista applications installed on a XP system? Which particular applications run slowly? What programs do you have running automatically at startup? Run MSCONFIG and look under the Startup Tab.

How many Processes to you have running? Look in Task Manager and see how many processes are running automatically at startup.

There are stil a lot of things to look at even after a restore.

[mediamark]

Thanks for your response.

I'm running Vista, which I've had no past problems with generally.

The drive reads most discs, although I've noticed a few that were burnt on it are no longer readable and as stated some original discs are not recognized at all.

I've cut down the apps that are launched at start up to the minimum.

I'm using Comodo firewall and AVG anti virus. Could it be these?