I have an ancient Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600 laptop with WinXP Pro and MS Office on it. It's always been reliable, although slow. I no longer connect it to the internet, although it has Avast AVG (with 1 service running). I usually just close the lid and let it hibernate, and I did that a couple of weeks ago without leaving it plugged in, and it ran out of power and shut down.
Since that time, it has been unuseable. I can do a hard shutdown, and it boots right up, allows me to log on, and then whatever app I try to run, it just hangs. I did manage to do disk cleanup on my admin account and run a defrag a couple of days ago, but mostly I can't get it to respond. I can open control panel and look at installed programs, but that hangs, and then I can't get anything to close. Pretty much everything looks like it will start, but at some point it hangs, and the only thing I can do is a hard shutdown. Ctrl-Alt-Del won't respond, shutdown hasn't responded at all.
Sometimes, on a reboot it does a disk check before starting Windows, and that seems to run through fine. I'm going to go do another hard shutdown, and try to check the volume for errors from Windows. I was told to try sfc /purgecache and sfc /cachesize=150, but the first command locked up the machine.
I know it won't be even worth the time to try Word (which is mainly what I use it for).
What might be wrong, and is there anything I can do?
Update: hard shutdown, restart, restarted fine and I logged in, ran disk check, and it is fine. Went to shutdown, and it has quit responding. The mouse moves, but I can't click on anything. I do a ctrl-alt-del and go to task manager, and now it won't close or respond.
Best Answer
I know this probably won't be a popular answer but if you really mostly use the laptop for running Word I would suggest that you use the Manufacturers disk to restore the machine to its original state and start fresh. If you do not have the disk, they are often available from the manufacturer for a small fee.
The time you could spend troubleshooting something like this could be never-ending. You may have a bad hard drive or controller but that is really hard to pin down until it is too late. Save yourself the grief and just start again.
Restore the machine fresh and install Word. Shouldn't take more than an hour depending on how long it takes you to back up your data. Since it's a laptop you probably haven't installed a lot of peripherals so there shouldn't be any driver hunting except possibly re-updating some of the drivers to the latest version.