I am trying to fix a laptop that is having a few problems. This is a Dell Inspiron 8500 from 2003. One 80 gig HD and a DVD/CD-rw drive. I have fixed some of the problems , but for some reason, whenever you click the "My Computer" icon, it sits there for about 2 mins before is shows the pc's drives.(You know, the damn Flashlight that goes back and forth). Anything to do with "My Computer" freezes up. Example, when you go to "Save as" on the web or any other app, it freezes. Also, upon startup after the sign in screen it sits for at least a minute. This leads my to believe there is something wrong with the drives being recognized and probably a process running in the background, but what ? I ran the program "Process Explorer" to see what was going on, and besides Messenger, there isn't anything that is running that would cause a problem. I disabled messenger but there is still a hang up. Figured what the hell, might as well rename it in safe mode to disable it since the owner doesn't use it.



This thing has been sent in already for a motherboard replacment, as most Dell's have problems that were built around 2003. Supposedly there was a very large batch of defective Laptops from that time. I know 4 people who had to send them back.

Any help is appreciated.

Take any CDs out of the cd drive. Also remove any external devices - particularly those with storage. Are there any network drives mapped on this machine? Right click the My Computer icon and choose "disconnect network drive...you will be shown all of the drives currently mapped. Usually Windows does this slow folder behavior if there is a mapped drive and an active connection to a network other than the network where the drives are mapped to. Windows gets stuck in a loop where it sees there's a connection, tries to make the mapped drives available but then can't because the active connection has no route to the network where the mapped resources exist...it's not smart enough to see that the network it is trying to reach is inaccessible so it keeps trying because it assumes that since there's a connection it should be able to make the drives accessible in the UI.