Dying hard drive cause a computer to be very slow?

[SAWYER]

I have an old Vista Gateway laptop I am messing with. It is insanely slow on starting up and a little better once loaded. I have just did a fresh install of Windows 7 and it is still the same so I know it isnt because of virus or anything. It is the original hard drive so I figure it is probably close to dying, would this be a the likely culprit for the pc being so slow?

 

[Blain]

Slap a SSD in there and don't look back.

* How much memory does the laptop have installed?

 

[R0H1T]

No, a dying system drive will throw lots of errors & the occasional BSOD, what you're describing is probably symptomatic of the drive being painfully slow. Maybe an upgrade to SSHD or SSD would serve you better if you plan to use that thing for anything more than entertainment or web browsing.

Also as Blain said, some amount of paging will be evident if you don't have sufficient amount of RAM.

 

[Elixer]

I have an old Vista Gateway laptop I am messing with. It is insanely slow on starting up and a little better once loaded. I have just did a fresh install of Windows 7 and it is still the same so I know it isnt because of virus or anything. It is the original hard drive so I figure it is probably close to dying, would this be a the likely culprit for the pc being so slow?

It could very well be a drive that is on the way out.
Check SMART (with something like crystaldiskinfo), and see what it shows, and also check event viewer, to see if any errors are shown.

 

[Ketchup]

No, a dying system drive will throw lots of errors & the occasional BSOD, what you're describing is probably symptomatic of the drive being painfully slow. Maybe an upgrade to SSHD or SSD would serve you better if you plan to use that thing for anything more than entertainment or web browsing.

Also as Blain said, some amount of paging will be evident if you don't have sufficient amount of RAM.

Nope, this can happen SAWYER. Had a dying Maxtor from years ago (a few others, but that is the most memorable) that passed a Seatools test and a S.M.A.R.T. test with flying colors, but it was as slow as anything and running incredibly hot. New hard drive (copying data and no other changes), and BAM, back to normal speed.

 

[SAWYER]

It is for a friend who just uses it for web browsing

 

[Blain]

RAM?

 

[Lorne]

Yes the drive could be on its way out and not throw errors otherwise.
I just replaced two laptop drives for friends that did what Ketchup just mentioned.
On both I first tried reinstalling OS and it did not fix, I even did intensive viri checks and nothing, No smart errors.
Replaced drives and the systems work fine.
Note, I was going to use the HDs as data drives and one was dead as soon as it was removed and the other runs hot and does only about 20MBs transfers so both were trashed.

 

[ArisVer]

You have to be more informative for the people who are trying to help you. Need specification information of the notebook model, cpu, ram and disk. Find the information from programs like CPUZ.

Depending on the specs, I would use it, upgrade it, or discard it.

 

[VirtualLarry]

As others have said, it could well be a HDD that's on the way out. You would get pauses, where the mouse cursor itself freezes up briefly, or applications "white out" in Win7 (not responding).

If those things are NOT happening, then it's quite possible that the HDD is not failing, but is just old and slow, and possibly you don't have enough RAM for Win7 either.

 

[jackd1839]

Increase your RAM. May be it is the only cause which is making your PC slow.

 

[PliotronX]

It most certainly can cause a system to be sluggish. I was not aware of this fact about a decade ago with a Seagate 320GB that had a few hitches here and there yet SMART did not show anything. Then one day it took 30 minutes to boot to Windows. Before I could diagnose it any further, the system just became too slow to use. Putting the drive into another system, I was unable to grab any files of substantial size because the average transfer rate was in double digit kilobytes per second. Then I read of the freezer trick and decided to try it out because I wanted to get more off and not have it just die in the middle of it. Four hours in the freezer, it actually did speed it up for about 15 minutes in which time I got all my "bidness" off of it. The hard drive met a tragic death by a few .40 caliber rounds as it was out of the meager warranty.

Anywho! Yes, hard drives can make a system grind to a halt.

 

[Zodiark1593]

When my hdd was dying, the pc became insanely slow, somewhere in the ballpark of 2 minutes. Couple days later, I get a warning from Windows concerning the impending data apocalypse. Replaced it with an Optima 240 GB for ~$100 and I was up again by the next day.

 

[Brado78]

Hey, Try running a Malware and Adaware scan. Trojans and Adaware will slow a computer down to a crawl. Virus checkers won't catch everything.

 

[SAWYER]

I put a different drive in and all is good

 

[Ketchup]

Sweet! Thanks for the update.