About a year and a half ago, the hard drive died on my WinXP PC, so I got a Windows 8.1 computer which has been my primary PC ever since. Until last night, that is, when its hard drive seems to have gone bad. (I replaced my WinXP's hard drive later, and am now posting from it.)
Unlike my WinXP drive, which had the "click of death," my Win8.1 still boots, but it runs extremely slow. I first started noticing odd behavior when my mouse locked up several times this past week. Although I've had applications or even Windows itself stop responding numerous times, I've never had my cursor stop moving like this before. Then yesterday afternoon, after waking my computer from sleep, I got a message in Thunderbird telling me that there wasn't enough disk space to download new messages. Nonsense, I thought (I have hundreds of GBs of free space), so I restarted Thunderbird and it worked fine again.
Last night, I restarted my computer after installing several Windows updates, and left my desk to go do something else. When I came back to check if my PC was finished restarting, I saw that it was still installing updates. I thought nothing of this, since some Windows updates do take quite a while to install. But when I checked again a few minutes later, I saw this message on the screen: "Scanning and repairing drive D." Now I thought, What on earth is going on? D is my system recovery partition. After a long time, my computer finally booted up.
So I logged in, hoping that all was well, but it wasn't. It took ages for the desktop background to load, then my taskbar shortcuts, my desktop shortcuts, etc. My antivirus software wasn't in the system tray, or anything else. Now I was thinking, Do I have a virus or what? I tried restarting my computer, and what usually takes only a minute took 10-20 minutes. Any program I tried to start took ages to load and constantly locked up. When Windows Task Manager finally loaded, it showed that explorer.exe was frequently not responding.
I had a restore point from the day before, so I tried doing a system restore. That too took ages (I think I had to wait five minutes before it even appeared on the screen), so I let it run overnight. When I woke up this morning, there was a message saying that it failed to restore a certain file. I ignored it, but when I tried to start any programs they were again so terribly slow. I switched from my regular user account to my admin account, and things seemed to run faster.
Good, I thought, maybe I just have a corrupted user account, and I can get myself out of this mess. But no, I went to empty the Recycle Bin and my computer locked up. Thinking the problem was caused by the Windows updates that had just been installed, I booted into Linux (since my PC has Windows 8.1 and Fedora 22 dual boot). At first it seemed to be loading fast, but then it too became just as slow.
So finally I started wondering if my hard drive is going bad, and what I read online so far seems to confirm it. A hard drive that's going bad can make your computer lock up, and run very slow (especially when running file operations). But now I'm thinking, How could a computer that I got brand new only a year and a half ago have a failing hard drive already?
Thankfully I have my files backed up, and a comparable replacement hard drive costs only about $50. But before getting one, I wanted to check if you think that my hard drive is indeed the problem?
Unlike my WinXP drive, which had the "click of death," my Win8.1 still boots, but it runs extremely slow. I first started noticing odd behavior when my mouse locked up several times this past week. Although I've had applications or even Windows itself stop responding numerous times, I've never had my cursor stop moving like this before. Then yesterday afternoon, after waking my computer from sleep, I got a message in Thunderbird telling me that there wasn't enough disk space to download new messages. Nonsense, I thought (I have hundreds of GBs of free space), so I restarted Thunderbird and it worked fine again.
Last night, I restarted my computer after installing several Windows updates, and left my desk to go do something else. When I came back to check if my PC was finished restarting, I saw that it was still installing updates. I thought nothing of this, since some Windows updates do take quite a while to install. But when I checked again a few minutes later, I saw this message on the screen: "Scanning and repairing drive D." Now I thought, What on earth is going on? D is my system recovery partition. After a long time, my computer finally booted up.
So I logged in, hoping that all was well, but it wasn't. It took ages for the desktop background to load, then my taskbar shortcuts, my desktop shortcuts, etc. My antivirus software wasn't in the system tray, or anything else. Now I was thinking, Do I have a virus or what? I tried restarting my computer, and what usually takes only a minute took 10-20 minutes. Any program I tried to start took ages to load and constantly locked up. When Windows Task Manager finally loaded, it showed that explorer.exe was frequently not responding.
I had a restore point from the day before, so I tried doing a system restore. That too took ages (I think I had to wait five minutes before it even appeared on the screen), so I let it run overnight. When I woke up this morning, there was a message saying that it failed to restore a certain file. I ignored it, but when I tried to start any programs they were again so terribly slow. I switched from my regular user account to my admin account, and things seemed to run faster.
Good, I thought, maybe I just have a corrupted user account, and I can get myself out of this mess. But no, I went to empty the Recycle Bin and my computer locked up. Thinking the problem was caused by the Windows updates that had just been installed, I booted into Linux (since my PC has Windows 8.1 and Fedora 22 dual boot). At first it seemed to be loading fast, but then it too became just as slow.
So finally I started wondering if my hard drive is going bad, and what I read online so far seems to confirm it. A hard drive that's going bad can make your computer lock up, and run very slow (especially when running file operations). But now I'm thinking, How could a computer that I got brand new only a year and a half ago have a failing hard drive already?
Thankfully I have my files backed up, and a comparable replacement hard drive costs only about $50. But before getting one, I wanted to check if you think that my hard drive is indeed the problem?