Laptop is shit fucking slow; Pretty sure it's hard drive damage... GETTING TIRED OF FREEZING
37 replies, posted
You see, I prop my laptop up with a Wii remote on a table while I'm not using it and it's still on, so it still gets airflow under it, right?
Well my family and I's collective clumsiness has bumped my laptop/the table hard enough a few times to where the Wii remote slips out from under it and SLAM!! the laptop goes onto the table. The brunt of the force goes to the front of the laptop- right where the hard drive is. Ouch. Not good.
Each time this happens my computer gets slower and slower. Even after I've stopped leaving it propped up like that it's still getting slower like it's still getting physical shocks, when it's not.
What leads me to believe it's my hard drive, besides of the flaming red-flagged evidence above, is that I only freeze up/experience mass slowdowns when I access a program not cached in RAM. Such as, leaving Chrome up in the background while playing Garry's Mod for about 15 minutes, then going back to it to try to do something, I freeze up and lag like shit. By freeze I mean entire screen freeze. Mouse and all. But after it stops lagging, it's smooth sailing from there until I do it again.
And it's getting old. Fast.
It sometimes takes an entire minute for Chrome to respond to me clicking a link from an external source, and UAC (which I still have enabled because it has saved my ass before) takes up to 30 seconds or more, the entire time during my screen is black.
Here's some photo evidence with HDTune and other such things:
[img]http://puu.sh/25kDi[/img]
[img]http://puu.sh/25kFx[/img]
(This was after Gmod had crashed from an unrelated error and I was experiencing a massive lag)
SMART info:
[img]http://puu.sh/25kLd[/img]
Specs:
[img]http://puu.sh/25kMn[/img]
[B]What I have tried:[/B]
Defragging with Defraggler
Disk cleanup
Zipping up my large folders that I don't constantly access (wasn't my idea, but it seems to have helped a tiny bit)
Virus scans with Malwarebytes and MSE, returned nothing
What should I do? If I need a new hard drive, what can I do in the mean time to help speed things up a bit until I can afford one?
[B]I want to avoid reformatting as much as possible.[/B]
Please and thank you.
[editline]19th February 2013[/editline]
Might I add I haven't experienced other issues related to hard drive damage, like corrupted/missing files, things randomly crashing, BSODs, strange noises coming from the hard drive, and the like.
This is a pretty damn odd problem, and I'm not entirely sure what's going on for you. The HDD is the only thing I can think of that would do this, but I don't feel like that's the issue. Maybe try reseating the RAM?
[editline]19th February 2013[/editline]
turn off aero if you like
[QUOTE=Naaz;39650212]This is a pretty damn odd problem, and I'm not entirely sure what's going on for you. The HDD is the only thing I can think of that would do this, but I don't feel like that's the issue. Maybe try reseating the RAM?
[editline]19th February 2013[/editline]
turn off aero if you like[/QUOTE]
I know, right? It doesn't make any damn sense.
That panel has been opened recently to see what exactly brand/model of RAM is in my computer, and I checked to make sure its firmly seated.
For a while I used nothing but Classic theme, that didn't change anything.
Have you tried cleaning out any potential dust? Maybe it got lodged in there by the knocks...?
Maybe the PSU is messed up and not delivering proper power...?
I'd really suspect a HDD failure, just not the kind that I've seen before.
My vents are cleared on a daily basis. I really don't want to open it up any further to check for other dust, I'm scared I'll fuck something up. My temps are all fine.
What do you mean by that? It charges normally and the battery has a very little wear level... Unless you mean it's not delivering proper power to the hard drive, but I have no clue how to check that.
[editline]20th February 2013[/editline]
I'd check to see if the hard drive is partially dislodged from the SATA port from the knocks, since that thought has crossed my mind a couple of times, but the way Dell designed this computer (sigh) there's no hard drive bay/door/etc.
I'd have to partially dismantle it to get to it. Like I said with the dust thing, I'd be very uncomfortable doing that as I'd easily fuck something up.
I know this may sound simple, but is your hard-drive getting full? I don't see any pictures of what space you have left, and these symptoms match to what I experienced when my hard drive got really full.
[QUOTE=Chief Tiger;39661447]I know this may sound simple, but is your hard-drive getting full? I don't see any pictures of what space you have left, and these symptoms match to what I experienced when my hard drive got really full.[/QUOTE]
93GB of 500GB used.
I don't think so.
Damn, was worth a shot. Sometimes the simplest things are overlooked (speaking for myself here).
[QUOTE=Chief Tiger;39662081]Damn, was worth a shot. Sometimes the simplest things are overlooked (speaking for myself here).[/QUOTE]Yeah, damn I didn't think of that.
Maybe the knocks were just coincidental? Can you try reinstalling Windows?
From the OP:
"[B]I want to avoid reformatting as much as possible.[/B]"
I don't have an installation disc. Didn't come with one and I never burned my own like they make you do nowadays.
I know I could download an ISO and use the key on the underside of my laptop, but I hate finding drivers with a fucking passion. I can't stand it at all. It's so annoying.
And there's so many things I'd have to back up that I haven't already (namely my entire Gmod addons folder) that won't fit on my flash drive, and my 1TB external is unusable by computers. It's in some weird format that only a Nintendo Wii can read, since ours is hacked.
When you get a new hard drive, it comes from the factory unconditioned. Some areas of the platters can have weak magnetic fields and bits on the platter can be in some state other than 1 or 0. This causes the controller on the drive to keep reading the area longer than it has to and slowing everything down.
Windows versions starting with Vista don't properly format the drive when first installing Windows (and don't provide an option to), it only performs a "quick" format, which only writes a basic file allocation table and leaves the rest of the drive untouched. This causes Windows dumb disk I/O subsystem to slow way down, regurgitate file I/O errors or simply BSOD when accessing these weak areas of the drive.
I've had this problem personally with factory new drives and Windows regurgitating errors about Disk I/O errors when trying to copy files to weak areas of the drive. The only way I was able to fix it was to use a disk partition live CD to do a full format of the drive and zero it out.
The only other method that's not guaranteed to work is use Piriform CCleaners' "Wipe free space" utility to zero unused areas of the drive. It can sometimes fix weak areas of the drive, but not always.
[QUOTE=bohb;39675710]When you get a new hard drive, it comes from the factory unconditioned. Some areas of the platters can have weak magnetic fields and bits on the platter can be in some state other than 1 or 0. This causes the controller on the drive to keep reading the area longer than it has to and slowing everything down.
Windows versions starting with Vista don't properly format the drive when first installing Windows (and don't provide an option to), it only performs a "quick" format, which only writes a basic file allocation table and leaves the rest of the drive untouched. This causes Windows dumb disk I/O subsystem to slow way down, regurgitate file I/O errors or simply BSOD when accessing these weak areas of the drive.
I've had this problem personally with factory new drives and Windows regurgitating errors about Disk I/O errors when trying to copy files to weak areas of the drive. The only way I was able to fix it was to use a disk partition live CD to do a full format of the drive and zero it out.
The only other method that's not guaranteed to work is use Piriform CCleaners' "Wipe free space" utility to zero unused areas of the drive. It can sometimes fix weak areas of the drive, but not always.[/QUOTE]I don't want to direct the thread away from the OP, but a quick question: if I want to avoid this as much as possible, for a new hard drive, before installing Windows 7, can I do a full format with a spare XP disc and then simply exit the setup program?
[QUOTE=bohb;39675710]When you get a new hard drive, it comes from the factory unconditioned. Some areas of the platters can have weak magnetic fields and bits on the platter can be in some state other than 1 or 0. This causes the controller on the drive to keep reading the area longer than it has to and slowing everything down.
Windows versions starting with Vista don't properly format the drive when first installing Windows (and don't provide an option to), it only performs a "quick" format, which only writes a basic file allocation table and leaves the rest of the drive untouched. This causes Windows dumb disk I/O subsystem to slow way down, regurgitate file I/O errors or simply BSOD when accessing these weak areas of the drive.
I've had this problem personally with factory new drives and Windows regurgitating errors about Disk I/O errors when trying to copy files to weak areas of the drive. The only way I was able to fix it was to use a disk partition live CD to do a full format of the drive and zero it out.
The only other method that's not guaranteed to work is use Piriform CCleaners' "Wipe free space" utility to zero unused areas of the drive. It can sometimes fix weak areas of the drive, but not always.[/QUOTE]
Uhh, some of what you said flew straight over my head but I'll try to reply anyways...
This isn't a new computer. I've had this for about a year.
It didn't even slowly creep up on me, it happened pretty abruptly after a hard knock against the table and has gotten worse since then, including the knocks afterwards.
However it hasn't hit the table for quite some time now and it's still getting progressively worse.
Perhaps I'll try CCleaner since I already installed that to clear garbage data earlier.
[QUOTE=Naaz;39678756]I don't want to direct the thread away from the OP, but a quick question: if I want to avoid this as much as possible, for a new hard drive, before installing Windows 7, can I do a full format with a spare XP disc and then simply exit the setup program?[/QUOTE]
Just use Minitools' Partition Wizard. It's faster, has a better interface and is designed with the purpose of formatting drives. Just remember that the default formatting options are for a quick format, you have to manually choose to do a full format on the drive.
[url]http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html[/url]
[QUOTE=SuperDuperScoot;39680541]Uhh, some of what you said flew straight over my head but I'll try to reply anyways...
This isn't a new computer. I've had this for about a year.
It didn't even slowly creep up on me, it happened pretty abruptly after a hard knock against the table and has gotten worse since then, including the knocks afterwards.
However it hasn't hit the table for quite some time now and it's still getting progressively worse.
Perhaps I'll try CCleaner since I already installed that to clear garbage data earlier.[/QUOTE]
It doesn't matter if your computer is a year old. If the drive was never properly formatted to begin with, the problem can happen at any time. The areas on the data read graph from HD Tune show you the problem areas of the drive (lowest read speed) Windows could have avoided writing files there, or commonly used files; Which would explain why it took so long for the problem to show up.
Your hard drive is in perfect health otherwise. If those hard knocks against the table caused damage, you'd see it in the S.M.A.R.T. data as massive amounts of reallocated sectors/pending reallocated sectors from a head strike, which clearly hasn't happened.
[QUOTE=bohb;39681648]Just use Minitools' Partition Wizard. It's faster, has a better interface and is designed with the purpose of formatting drives. Just remember that the default formatting options are for a quick format, you have to manually choose to do a full format on the drive.
[url]http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html[/url]
It doesn't matter if your computer is a year old. If the drive was never properly formatted to begin with, the problem can happen at any time. The areas on the data read graph from HD Tune show you the problem areas of the drive (lowest read speed) Windows could have avoided writing files there, or commonly used files; Which would explain why it took so long for the problem to show up.
Your hard drive is in perfect health otherwise. If those hard knocks against the table caused damage, you'd see it in the S.M.A.R.T. data as massive amounts of reallocated sectors/pending reallocated sectors from a head strike, which clearly hasn't happened.[/QUOTE]
Those areas differ every time. I've ran several repeated tests and it always varies, one test even showed no drop-outs at all.
I'm not sure if that has any relation, since I'm still a tad confused about what you're talking about... So I'm not going to doubt your words.
Anything I should do or precautionary measures I should take before running the wipe free space thing? A little scared it could fuck something up.
Wipe free space should do nothing other than write zeroes to unused parts of the disk.
But if that doesn't solve it, I would do a full format after backing up everything.
[QUOTE=bohb;39681648]Just use Minitools' Partition Wizard. It's faster, has a better interface and is designed with the purpose of formatting drives. Just remember that the default formatting options are for a quick format, you have to manually choose to do a full format on the drive.
[url]http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html[/url][/QUOTE]Is this a desktop program or something that runs off a bootable USB drive? I'd like to fully format my drive [i]before[/i] installing Windows.
It's both a Windows application and a Live CD.
Cool. Will download.
Qq: Have you tried booting it in another known good machine yet? To eliminate other hardware as a potential problem.
[QUOTE=A_flyboy;39696157]Qq: Have you tried booting it in another known good machine yet? To eliminate other hardware as a potential problem.[/QUOTE]
Herp, let's just rip a hard drive out of one machine and toss it in another machine and attempt to boot off of it, totally nothing will go wrong and destroy the Windows installation, totally.
I built a desktop for a supervisor where I work(under the table, scraped parts in working condition, manager gave the OK etc.) Swapping parts out of a case that the supervisors father in law bought as a "High End gaming computer" off craigslist. I think it had an Athlon II(with no thermal paste on the processor!!!) I swapped the motherboard, and processor out because it wouldn't POST(previously did) for a spare board and 1366 processor we had on the shelf and it actually booted up all the way to the login screen on Win7. It had a password so I couldn't go any further, but I was pretty surprised to say the least.
[QUOTE=Del91;39697113]I built a desktop for a supervisor where I work(under the table, scraped parts in working condition, manager gave the OK etc.) Swapping parts out of a case that the supervisors father in law bought as a "High End gaming computer" off craigslist. I think it had an Athlon II(with no thermal paste on the processor!!!) I swapped the motherboard, and processor out because it wouldn't POST(previously did) for a spare board and 1366 processor we had on the shelf and it actually booted up all the way to the login screen on Win7. It had a password so I couldn't go any further, but I was pretty surprised to say the least.[/QUOTE]
It's not at that point it fucks up, it's more software and drivers that might do some conflicts.
It's a lot more likely to just have a bunch of driver errors if you move the hard drive over. Those "problems" are temporary, and not important. If you try it, and the specific problem goes away, you know it isn't the HDD.
[QUOTE=A_flyboy;39705813]It's a lot more likely to just have a bunch of driver errors if you move the hard drive over. [B]Those "problems" are temporary, and not important[/B]. If you try it, and the specific problem goes away, you know it isn't the HDD.[/QUOTE]
You obviously don't know how Windows works do you?
The problems don't "go away". When you move to a completely different set of hardware, Windows tries to find new drivers for basically everything. The problem is that the old drivers aren't removed, nor are the massive numbers of registry entries used to support all of the old drivers.
So basically you have this machine with drivers for two different sets of hardware that can cause bizarre conflicts, increase the space used by the OS by a bunch and completely trash the registry and slow the machine down.
Let's also not forget that Windows usually makes you reactivate when you do this, so you'll have to do it twice; Once when you move it and once when you move it back.
^Always use windows, never had any of the above problems.
I also recently had the misfortune of purchasing 4 rebranded MSI laptops. 1 of which had different specs from the rest. After playing musical chassis, i'm currently using the last one standing, with a quick-grip holding one of the hinges from blowing completely apart. We've since replaced everybody else's with machines that work, but alas, as the default IT person, I'm stuck with the lemon case.
Back on topic, if we take the safe route and assume that your copy of windows does funny things like bohb's, then you're stuck doing one-by-one hardware replacement tests to isolate the cause. I was simply aiming for a "check our most probable/suggested cause" approach, so we can either solve the problem, or move past HDD failure as the origin.
Whenever I've swapped an hard disk with a windows installation into a different PC I've always had BSOD's shortly after post, I've had it happen with XP, vista and windows 7 (I'm the kind of idiot who messes around to see how a system responds to certain changes, like swapping out ram/components whilst the system is in hibernation mode.)
One basic rule I've set up with my PC is if the motherboard is going to change for any windows installation, reformat.
Use a Linux live cd to check, if it works fine your Windows installation is screwed, if not, buy a new hard drive.
It could also be your memory, try run [url=http://www.memtest.org/]this[/url].
The reason I say memory is because the graph show a lot of hard faults which means it's writing to the disk, if you took the screenshot while running something that consumes a lot of memory this is normal but if it's that bad at idle you have a problem.
That said it's most likely the hard drive.
[QUOTE=Chryseus;39711632]Use a Linux live cd to check, if it works fine your Windows installation is screwed, if not, buy a new hard drive.
It could also be your memory, try run [url=http://www.memtest.org/]this[/url].
The reason I say memory is because the graph show a lot of hard faults which means it's writing to the disk, if you took the screenshot while running something that consumes a lot of memory this is normal but if it's that bad at idle you have a problem.
That said it's most likely the hard drive.[/QUOTE]
I'll try and find some blank CDs. I'd use my flash drive, but last time I did that to run Linux on my old netbook I accidentally the MBR. Never again.
As for memory, at the time of that screenshot, Garry's Mod had just crashed from an unrelated error. (Overflow from too many bullet tracers)
Currently just running Chrome, Steam, and a few other select things there are little to no hard faults.
But while running Garry's Mod, which devours my RAM even though it's allocation is 1GB (was 3, which was insane), there's a lot of them.
Update on this.
I installed some "new" RAM (came from significant other's laptop of the same model) so I now have 8GB instead of 4, and increased the pagefile quite a bit.
Ever since my computer has been running a lot better. Not all of the freezing is gone, but it's 10000x more tolerable than it was.
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