How I spent New Year's Day

About six months ago my niece bought a laptop (with a little advice from her uncle). In early October it began to REALLY slow down at start-up and even clicking a desktop icon was a major time commitment.

So, I offered to look at it over Thanksgiving and did my traditional trouble shooting process:

1. Run PC Pitstop
   
2. Check for spyware
3. Defrag
4. Reboot and hope it is a good karma day

Well, round one made it a little better, but over Christmas it was brought to my attention that the "slowness" remained. It had. Drat.

So on January 1 with the aid of CPU-Z and PC Pit Stop again (and 17 reboots at last count), I was eventually guided to discover DMA was not enabled on her hard drive anymore. Finally! A reason why the laptop could from fast to slow and NOT be motherboard related.

A few more Google searches got me to winhelp.com's DMA info and fix. And wonder of wonders, all is well and MySpace, Sims 2, and IMs galore are whistling through the laptop.

Also learned the "Always On" power profile can help make sure your laptop CPU is running at top speed.

So, why share this thrilling tale? Many others had shared similar tales of woe and their experiences - good and bad. These helped lead me to the promised land of a fixed problem. Maybe some other uncle will be out there some day searching for a solution to a similar problem and this posting will help.