LFH Again. Is this HD or memory that's at fault?

[larciel]

Here's situation.

*Dell Dimension 4700 about a year old.
WinXP, 3ghz p4, 512mb, 80gb SATA

About two months ago, customer complained of really long lagging of windows response, when I got there, everything was just dragging, 1 minute to open "my computer"

I checked task manager, no spyware clogging upmemory, nor any unusual usage. the owner of the computer has been using computer fine w/out any trouble.

I suspected it was HD that was going dead, but just for sake, I checked memTest and it turned out fine. So before I replace HD, I reformat the drive, and windows is back to normal speed!

yesterday I got a call for same problem.. computer being slow. went to check and it's same problem, and I really think HD is on its last legs.

but I don't hear anything to support my theory. the usual 'click, click' or empty spinning.. nothing's there.

am I right to suspect it's the HD? or could it be something else.

is there a software that runs to check what parts are the weakest link?

 

[Kalmah]

I'm not exactly sure how, but if the hd supports S.M.A.R.T. I think you might be able to check its status in the BIOS.

Run checkdisk also to see if it reports problems.

Hopefully somebody else that knows more about it will chime in here.

 

[xgsound]

If the drive is running in PIO mode when you arrive changing the drive makes sense for a business customer. While you don't have definate evidence that the drive is at fault, this is a reasonable "best guess" and eliminates the drive as a cause should it happen again.

The immediate problem is in the windows installation, but the initial cause could be hardware, heat, or malware instigated. Sandra is the windows based utility I use. Ultimate boot CD is what I use for raw hardware testing. The sticky in Software-apps http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=33&threadid=1658987&enterthread=y has a program that checks for many Smitfraud variants. Check Flying Penguins malware removal procedure if you're interested. http://theflyingpenguin.com/spyware-removal.shtml Spycatcher is one program he uses. It installs as a rootkit and checks for them and other malware. He and I uninstall it after use, but you can leave it installed for aggressive real time protection if warranted. You should probably test it on your machine before leaving it on a customer machine since you'll have to support it.


Jim

 

[Fraggable]

Sounds like hard drive issues to me. If the system completely locks up for about a minute and then comes back and seems to work of for a while, then it's probably the HDD. Memory wouldn't do that, it would just be unbelievably slow, and that's not the issue if you've got 512M - unless you've got a mad memory chip and it's not really running with 512MB.

Running a chkdsk /r or defragging are good easy ways to test a hard drive's stability, or use Sandra for more extensive testing. You can use Speedfan to check SMART stats.