Does something look wrong with this drive?

[martian_aphid]

Hey guys

 

Hopefully someone can help me out with this issue I am having with my sister's laptop.

 

Basically she began complaining of really slow performance not long after she got it. At christmas I got a chance to check it out and it was shockingly slow.

 

It would take ~10mins to boot up, applications or files took ages to open, if audio was playing it would constantly stutter and video would jerk. Basically it was unusable.

 

Opening up defraggler showed the disk was just shot so I decided to back up the contents on an external and go for a fresh windows install [XP], which I completed on Monday this week. I then proceeded to install a couple of applications - firefox, a codec pack and couple of other things but pretty much a limited installation.

 

At first the performance seemed better, not great, but a noticable improvement over its previous state. Then I accepted the SP3 updates and all the updates that came after it which seemed to take an eternity. On the next startup things were once again tediously slow - it took a good 10 minutes to desktop, getting a response from the start button seemed to take about 2 minutes = :S

 

I opened up defraggler and this is what I saw:

 

 

Now I know a clean install, etc. leaves a defragmented drive but this looks pretty poor to me?

 

I'm not expert so I am wondering if this looks like a drive problem to anyone else? Or could it be something else? Basically in the space of a few days a fresh OS install has gone from ok to absolutely shocking, if possible worse than it was before.

 

Any help or insight is much appreciated, and feel free to ask me for any further info or to try something out.

 

MA

[_TheAlexO]

it sounds a little confusing, but you never stated that you have defragged it.. so defrag it now . you should of done that, ran ccleaner, and virus scans/cleans a few times in the beginning instead of doing a clean install.

 

im not sure if that would fix it but it seems everything is just bogged down so do all those things. i cant think of any more cleaning software off the top of my head, i just woke up. ha but there are plenty around the interweb

[martian_aphid]

Hey ShallowBay. My apologies but I wanted to keep the previous post brief so I did not go through the entire troubleshooting process which did include cleaning registry with CCleaner, scanning for viruses, running RAM tests and HDD tests, etc. At that point I was of the belief that the drive was just heavily fragmented [after not responding well to several defragmentation attempts] My final solution at the time was to just go with a clean install to see what the effect would be.

 

I understand that a drive becomes fragmented as a process over time and as well as due to installation of things in particular the OS, but I would never have expected a clean install to have dropped to this level of performance at all let alone after only several days. This is why I am assuming that there may be some more hardware related issues with the drive itself or perhaps some other subsystem that deals with the drive - I don't know?

 

As the SS shows, at that time the drive was being defragged, and over 12hours later still continues to be defragging at only 40% completion. I've defragged my 500gig desktop drive in a fraction of that time and with far more data on - this laptop drive only has 35gig of data on? That's why I'm wondering if it is a hardware issue.

[Scott P]

I really do not think that fragmentation would have the dramatic effect you are experiencing. When you did the reinstall, did you format the drive? Have you run any diagnostics on the drive to test it?

[CowKing]

http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download this is much better than defraggler IMO

[martian_aphid]

Hey Scott, I would tend to agree. I think the defragmentation is perhaps the symptom of some other problem rather than simply the cause itself.

 

Before, I think I ran seatools diagnostics which didn't complete and checked the SMART with speedfan but didn't see anything. Is there any kind of disk diagnostic you would recommend?

 

One thing I have noticed is the heat this thing chucks out, I am assuming that the heat might be having some effect on the disk if not on other components?

 

CowKing, I have a copy of Auslogic's defrag which I will attempt to install - having problems opening already installed programs so we'll see how it goes ;S

[wevsspot]

Since you have an external drive, you could always format the external drive and ghost the internal drive onto the external drive and boot from it to see if the performance is any different between the two drives.

 

My bet is that the internal drive is fixing to go kuput even if it appears to be passing diagnostic tests. Heat related issues could certainly be adding to the problem. Another indicator that the drive may be on it's way to failing.

[Waco]

If it's getting to be like that on a clean install (with plenty of free space) then I'd replace it ASAP. Whenever drives get a bit dodgy it's almost never worth relying on them anymore.

[Great_Gig]

I have never, ever seen a drive that fragmented before. Seems you have attempted to fix the problem in a logical way, but that IMO is the sign of a drive not performing as it should and about to fail. If it were me I would pull it and see if I can get a replacement under warranty.

[martian_aphid]

Thanks for the replies guys, I kind of had the idea that the drive was on its way out. Going to try the ghosting and booting from external which I suspect will show the internal drive is at fault, will also look into warranty, though I wonder if excessive heat is the issue, if it will damage any replacement drive :S