Slow Hard Drive Access

[Ettiave]

Ok this just recently started happening. I have a 250gb storage drive in my computer. I use it for downloading files onto. My downloads folder on the drive is about 50gb as of right now. Whenever I try to access the downloads folder the explorer shell gets so slow that it seems frozen. All my other programs run fine and I ctrl-alt-del and nothing is using up processing power. It is only that one folder. Any other folder on the drive works fine. The shell isn't completely frozen. I can click on the start menu or try scrolling but it takes about 10 seconds before it does anything. I checked disk defragmenter, and it says there is only 13 percent file fragmentation, so it's not that. When I boot up in safe mode I can access it fine by the way. Anyone have a suggestion?

 

[imported_Tick]

Corrupted sectors? Sounds like you drive if fubaring. Does your mobo and drive support SMART monitoring?

 

[Ettiave]

Thing is this drive is only 1 month old, and it works fine in safe mode. I enabled SMART on my mobo, how do I use it?

 

[ElTorrente]

There has been a few times in the past that I had this happen to me. Every time it was because of spyware/viruses using up my CPU time.

Download the best anti-spyware program: WindowsXP Anti-spyware Beta, and go to Trendmicro.com for a free online virus check. The windows spyware software is really, really good - does a lot more that find and prevent spyware. It'll stop suspicous scripts from running, port sniffing, startup programs in your registry, running processes, etc. I use it to keep my computer running fast and clean.