I am checking out a Pentium 3 laptop that is running Windows XP Home after a clean build. It is 800 Mhz and 256MB Ram, and 20GB HD. The odd issue is that it boots up fine without any error messages and is quick to get to desktop. But when launching applications at times it does not respond to the applications you double clicked to launch. You can start taskmgr and watch the CPU single core activity that rests around 3% activity at idle and when you double click the application you see a surge in activity for about 3 seconds and then back to 3% idle and applications dont launch. Applications that are a part of the normal windows clean build such as Internet Explorer etc sometimes launch and sometimes do this strange bahavior. I am thinking its a hardware issue, but I ran Memtest86 on this and it passes after quite a length of time for the Pentium3 to go through all the tests. Any suggestions on where to look next or other test utilities to run to figure out what is the culprit of this odd behavior. Most people would probably just junk this old Pentium3 laptop, but it bugs me that I havent been able to determine the exact cause even if the cause is a main board issue which I am unsure of. If a main board issue I would expect the failure results to be more catastrophic. I also look in the event log and its clean no error messages, so windows doesnt even know that its misbehaving. I also checked into the CPU temp and its running normal warm temp of about 100 degrees F as for these old P3's were known to run warm idle and this does run as quite the lapwarmer even with all fans running when applications take. That is what is also odd is that sometimes IE will launch and run without any problems and other times no response, yet in taskmgr you can see it recognised the mouse click and was attempting to start, but never successfully launched and never errored out and never posted an error to event log. Also tried a usb mouse instead of the touchpad etc that is integrated to laptop and same results with external USB mouse.
If there was a utility that can baby sit the applications to watch how they launch, maybe this error can be detected, but I dont know of any such apps?
I really expected the RAM to be the culprit, but it passed Memtest86 which is very thorough.