HP Pavilion DV6-2157US Laptop Issues

[Will Rickards]

So my wife has a HP DV6-2157US laptop.
It was just shutting off.
So I opened it and checked for dust and replaced the thermal compound between cpu and the heatsink.
It doesn't shut off anymore.
View of fan / heatsink
View of CPU

My first question is should I have replaced the thermal pad on what I assume is the chipset chip (on the right in photo)?
That looks like it can't possibly transfer heat very well and might be acting as an insulator. But maybe I'm wrong.
The temps are in the high 50's and low 60's, sometimes dips into like 49C. I have no idea what they were originally. AMD K10 processor.
That was problem 1. Probably solved.

But it is still super ass slow. And this is problem #2.
It was never the fastest laptop but we're talking multiple minutes to log in.
Large delays to open apps. The all programs list taking a while to show up.
There are no bad sectors reported by chkdsk and the transfer mode of the hard drive is listed as UDMA mode 6.
I'll probably try linux via a usb drive to verify the slowness isn't the hardware and then just reinstall windows.
I ran sfc /SCANNOW but it reported no problems.
Could the overheating have caused permanent damage or set some counter that makes it so slow?


p.s. I had to use power tools on this thing.
The screw that holds the wifi card in was stripped. No luck with rubber band trick or other things. So I had to drill it out. I took a screw that seemed extraneuous and used that to hold that card in.

 

[Mercutio]

Well now you know about some of the extra special hate I have for consumer laptops and HP in particular.

You could be seeing thermal throttling, but on a name brand notebook, that's probably something you have no ability to control. Would replacing the thermal pad on the chipset help? Maybe. But you don't really know what sensor is being used to determine that. 60C would be borderline acceptable on a desktop machine but I'm sure that's hot enough to make a notebook slow its CPU.

On the other hand, the issues you're describing all seem to be I/O bound. If you run Crystal Diskmark or the like, does it show anything deeply abnormal? Are the CPU-Z reports normal?

 

[Will Rickards]

Linux seems really quick so I don't think it is the hardware itself unless it is the hard drive. I'll run those other benchmarks.
I got it mostly back to not too bad by the ccleaner registry cleaning, disk cleaning, uninstalling MSE, disabling windows defender, installing nod32, uninstalling anything that didn't look needed.

 

[Will Rickards]

Got the replacement power connection (it would not always connect reliably) and put it in.
While there I put the thermal stuff on the chipset instead of that huge pad that was on there.
Temps dropped almost 10C.
Diskmark benchmark
What do you think?

 

[Mercutio]

Is it still sluggish? The drive itself is what I'd expect it to be.