Sister's laptop gets incredibly slow after a while. Hard drive to fault?

zivlaks

Honorable
Mar 10, 2013
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10,690
Okay so my sister's laptop gets incredibly slow after a while, and then it gets so slow that opening any program freezes it completely. You can move the mouse and click stuff but you can't do anything any more, open any programs etc. I checked the CPU temperatures while this happens - 67 C was max so I don't think it's CPU. It's some newer i3 so it shouldn't be this slow while browsing- she's not an advanced user

Any help, advice, or even just confirmation that it's the hard drive is greatly appreciated :) .



Additional info:


I ran a disk check after which I checked the SMART and got this:
9iEe8WK.png


Disk check log (it took about 30 hours to complete):
http://pastebin.com/9ytkSCT7
 
Solution
Make no mistake about it. Your sister's HDD is on the verge of a complete failure. She (or you) should *immediately* back up whatever files are important to her. Don't delay doing this. Probably best at this point - assuming another HDD is available - is to clone the contents of the Hitachi to that HDD via a USB connection. It's highly possible the disk-cloning operation will fail because of the condition of the Hitachi, but it's worth a try. But at the least backup what's important to her.

And then replace the Hitachi A/S/A/P.
Make no mistake about it. Your sister's HDD is on the verge of a complete failure. She (or you) should *immediately* back up whatever files are important to her. Don't delay doing this. Probably best at this point - assuming another HDD is available - is to clone the contents of the Hitachi to that HDD via a USB connection. It's highly possible the disk-cloning operation will fail because of the condition of the Hitachi, but it's worth a try. But at the least backup what's important to her.

And then replace the Hitachi A/S/A/P.
 
Solution


This would be normal if she was playing an intensive game but not normal while browsing or working on her word document. Use a util like Hwinfo and look at the instantaneous frequency and see whether the CPU is being throttled constantly, and as mentioned also note which process is taking up big CPU time.