Windows becomes sluggish with memory intensive applications

[Rafael Mestdag]

For example, when I'm unpacking a .rar file or installing a game, it becomes really slow to the point where I have to reboot. Is this normal?

 

[rgd1101]

No. it not normal. What your full system spec?

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

No. it not normal. What your full system spec?

Phenom II X4 945
nVidia GT630
Asus M2N68-AM
4Gb RAM DDR2
PSU: Generic 500 Watts

 

[rgd1101]

How old is the HDD? sound like it might be failing.

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

How old is the HDD? sound like it might be failing.

It's quite old and it's failing actually, but how can I be sure that's it? I don't have another HDD or PC to test.

 

[rgd1101]

First backup your important data,
then, try something like
http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/crystaldiskinfo.html

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

First backup your important data,
then, try something like
http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/crystaldiskinfo.html

It shows on the line "Reallocated Sectors Count" Current=1 Worst=1 Threshold=36

What does that mean?

 

[rgd1101]

it mean it ok. It is bad, if it get close to 36.

 

[jitpublisher]

Just an FYI, I recently replaced a drive that did not test as bad, even Hard Drive Tune showed acceptable performance, 100+ average transfer rates. (This was my secondary 1TB Western Digital Black drive I use for storage and programs) However, as I as was copying music to my phone recently, it seemed to take for ever, hours to be exact. So I tried an experiment copying back and forth from the drive to my SSD boot drive, still took about 30 minutes to copy the same 3.5 gig library of MP3's. Went and bought a new 1TB data drive, mirrored the old to the new one, it took all night long.
The new data drive......took only a few minutes to copy the same music library to my phone, instead of 4 hours. Copying back and forth from my SSD was measured in seconds, not minutes. I never did really notice a problem until I tried to copy that file library. Now, with the new drive, I can see that the whole PC is just much faster and more responsive. I guess that old drive slowly became bad in such a way that nothing really jumped out at me. I don't often do anything that requires moving around large files all at once. For sequential reads and everyday day stuff, it seemed, and tested okay.

To sum it up, even though no programs actually found anything wrong with the drive, it did have serious issues.