Please help! – trying to fix an old laptop

hey, guys. i’m working on a friend’s OLD laptop. there are no icons on the desktop, the only access to a usb or dvdrom is through my documents (unless i create a shortcut)…. it’s slow. i mean, it’s incredibly slow. i’ve tried reinstalling windows XP, windows vista (32 bit), and windows xp black….
i’ve got loads of tools for working on computers, but without an internet connection and no idea what’s happened to it, it’s just hard to work on. are there any steps, procedures, or software that you guys could recommend taking/using?
ANY help is greatly appreciated!
i’m sort of dead in the water… when i’ve tried to install the OS’s above, the computer simply shuts down half way through the majority of them. in fact, i have not successfully installed any other OS. that’s sort of a first.
maybe someone here has ran into similar issues with a friend’s old laptop that they said “sure. i’ll fix it up for maybe $15.” ::sigh::
Answer #1
Well probably best step would be – buy a new machine. But with that out of the question…
Give us full specs of the laptop. If it’s “designed for Windows XP” then it’s possibly slow and I’d guess it has barely minimal amount of RAM to run said XP, not much more. Like 256 MiB? I had a situation where I had to work on that kind of a laptop, with Celeron 1.5 and 256 MiB RAM, I installed Debian with LXDE (Xfce is also lightweight) – it worked pretty good. Of course I had to monitor RAM usage (I used Conky to do that) because when you use up almost all RAM you start to use Swap, which is on your HDD, and when that happens everything starts to slow down.
If you can’t even install an OS, well that could either be because your CPU is overheating in the process and starts to make mistakes, or just shutdowns the machine, or your RAM is faulty, or your HDD is slowly dying. The latter is most probable, I guess.
Answer #2
loads of tools for working on computers
like what ?
or your HDD is slowly dying
got a boot CD that can test the drive
CPU is overheating
the lappy feel warm when it shuts down ?
on any old PC’s I work on I use TinyXP rev11 for full functionality
or Beast edition or MicroXP (both on TinyXP rev11 disk) slimmed down versions of TinyXP
these are the slimiest, stable and fastest XP’s IMO
Answer #3
The hard disk on that laptop may be at the end of its run. Listing the specs might help more.
If it is really low on specs, give Lubuntu (an LXDE flavour of Ubuntu, so really light on resources) a go and see if it is still slow.
lubuntu.net