So I have this laptop here, it's 2 years old this june. Lovely machine, it's helped me get into the animation and PC gaming world properly. It's not a super-topoftheline-laptop. Some would argue "why a laptop", I say "I travel a lot".
Anyway, background info aside - this past year has been hell with this laptop. When playing games it overheats to the point of emergency shutdown (ie. just shutting down, no BSOD or error messages). After I vacuumed the fan for the first time in ever just a month ago, the crashes seemed to stop. I'd assume these crashes and overheating could take a toll on the hard-drive, which is why I think it's vital information.
Recently (yesterday) a friend of mine gifted me ARMA 2, which was really cool of him. It was late at night, though, and I had to go to bed. So I left the installer on over night, which I have done before with games thinking they'd be ready to play in the morning.
However, as I woke up today, I noticed my computer was unusually slow, and the area around my processor (or hard-drive) was unusually warm for just being on idle.
Just switching WINDOWS would cause the programs to slow down and almost crash. Opening the task manager takes forever, and when I try to cancel a program through there, it crashes both the program and the task manager. So I figure I'll just restart the computer. Sadly, that was easier said than done, because just clicking on the start orb almost crashed explorer.
I had to shut it down through the power button, which I also know isn't good for the hard-drive. And that has happened a few times before.
Computer boots up, I log in, and it's still slow. This time I really notice how slow it's getting, because on startup there's a GPU-related batch-script that [i]usually[/i] goes by in a flash - this time it took a good 5 minutes to disappear. I try to restart again, but once again it crashes at the start orb. I have to do another power-button restart.
This time it's even worse. The batch-script doesn't go away at all, and the mouse is having troubles moving around. I give up, unplug everything, take out the battery, exhause any energy still in it, and go to school for 4 hours. I come back home, and it's still unusually slow.
I'm right now trying to get the recovery program going, to see if reinstalling from factory settings will make a difference. I did get the start menu up by pressing the win-key, and typing in "recovery" is taking forever for the PC to understand.
Excuse the wall of text.
So I wonder - [B]is this recently extremely sluggish behavior of my computer the result of an imminent hard-disk failure?[/B]
It's possible for sure. You could try to run chkdsk (checkdisk) and see if you get any errors. I would start making backups anyway, if you haven't already.
Backup everything, check disk, reinstall Windows.
If the laptop is unusually warm as you said maybe you accidentally clumped up some dust while vacuuming.
Also, if it is almost 2 years old: I don't know where you live but in Europe you have a 2 year warranty by law. So imo you should go back to the store where it was bought.
[QUOTE=Drumdevil;35982256]Also, if it is almost 2 years old: I don't know where you live but in Europe you have a 2 year warranty by law. So imo you should go back to the store where it was bought.[/QUOTE]
Not all of Europe, in the UK 1 year is standard.
[QUOTE=Drumdevil;35982256]Backup everything, check disk, reinstall Windows.
If the laptop is unusually warm as you said maybe you accidentally clumped up some dust while vacuuming.
Also, if it is almost 2 years old: I don't know where you live but in Europe you have a 2 year warranty by law. So imo you should go back to the store where it was bought.[/QUOTE]
Reinstalling Windows seemed to work fine, but in the midst of all the stress I forgot to check disk. After the reinstall I lost about 30GB of HDD space though. A friend of mine says it could have to do with "sectors" in a hard-disk, and those were corrupted, thus I lost space?
Either way it's running smoothly again now, so that's not a problem.
And my warranty only lasted a year, and I've already used up my insurance once when the monitor failed.
[QUOTE=Derp Y. Mail;35989642]Reinstalling Windows seemed to work fine, but in the midst of all the stress I forgot to check disk. After the reinstall I lost about 30GB of HDD space though. A friend of mine says it could have to do with "sectors" in a hard-disk, and those were corrupted, thus I lost space?
Either way it's running smoothly again now, so that's not a problem.
And my warranty only lasted a year, and I've already used up my insurance once when the monitor failed.[/QUOTE]
Most likely this is the cause (bad sectors), as it sounds like what I have as well and I know its bad sectors because chkdisc finds it but can't fix it. My games drive lost about 20gb of space off it because of bad sectors, and they can't be repaired to I'm just waiting for it to die completely.
Whenever you think a drive is failing, backup first, check second.
[QUOTE=Derp Y. Mail;35989642]Reinstalling Windows seemed to work fine, but in the midst of all the stress I forgot to check disk. After the reinstall I lost about 30GB of HDD space though. A friend of mine says it could have to do with "sectors" in a hard-disk, and those were corrupted, thus I lost space?
Either way it's running smoothly again now, so that's not a problem.
And my warranty only lasted a year, and I've already used up my insurance once when the monitor failed.[/QUOTE]
30 GB of bad sectors is ridiculous, the drive wouldn't even work properly if it was that damaged. Windows partitioning software isn't smart enough to know what's bad and what isn't bad and format accordingly. Modern versions of Windows (Vista/7/8) just perform a quick format (make the MBR, etc in the beginning of the drive) and don't even bother with the rest of the disk.
More than likely you didn't partition the drive correctly (if Windows is reporting the drive is smaller than it used to be) or if it's reporting less free space, that's all of the crap services that suck up HD space (VSS, SuperFetch, WU cache, hiberfil).
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