My laptop has been running so slow nowadays. It’s a Toshiba Satellite M30 laptop running windows xp sp2 and it’s a 60gb hard drive with 45gb free space left and its still loading as slow as 10 minutes to completely start up from pressing the power button until opening the desktop.
Here’s the history of problems:
1. Recently, or about 2 months ago after reformatting, the laptop started making motor-like noises coming from the place where i believe the hard drive is. It makes noises whenever i type since i place my hand there. The noises disappear if a remove my hand from the area. However if the noise keeps persisting, it goes to a blue screen citing an error.
2. I use AVG 8 as my antivirus and other than the occasional cookies, it reports no viruses whatsoever. But lately, i had two system errors which forced me to either repair or reinstall windows the first of which was:
“Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM
You can attempt to repair this file by starting Windows Setup using the original Setup CD-ROM.
Select ‘r’ at the first screen to start repair”
and the second…
“Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\windows\System32\Drivers\Isapnp.sys
You can attempt to repair this file by starting Windows Setup using the original Setup CD-ROM.
Select ‘r’ at the first screen to start repair”
When i was reinstalling windows after the second error, i started having errors during the install such as “saving/writing wmp.dll… this could be caused by network or disk failure..” I could vaguely remember that error message/
I want to know if my hard drive is failing. I have a desktop using AVG as well and it has not had any problems such as what mty laptop is having and the desktop pc is older than my laptop. If it is, what could I do? If it is not, then what’s causing the problems i stated above?
It does sound like you are developing some damaged areas on the disk.
Agree with first poster about using scandisk to do a diagnostic.
Scandisk will tell you if there are any damaged portions and stop them being used, but its probably not a good idea to just rely on a scandisk repair as the solution. This because once a disk starts to deteriorate it will carry on getting worse.
Back up your data whilst you can. Buy a new disk.
use scan disc this will tell you if you have bad sectors if so a new hard
will need to be brought and installed
Could be, keep it backed up daily just in case. That’s good practice, anyway. When external hard drives cost so little now, nobody has any excuse to grumble that it’s difficult to stay well backed up. If there is a hard drive problem, the faults are likely to get more frequent quite swiftly, and then it will fail completely. Hard drive failures are quite common. Putting in a replacement drive just in case may be sensible, they cost so little now. But never be lazy about backing up.