QUESTION :
I feel dumb asking this, being A+ certified and all that, but I’m not sure what to start at. So this problem has been getting progressively and progressively worse, and now it’s to the point where using my computer is becoming a hassle. There’s still some things for me to do, but I wanted to get the ball rolling here, since it’s getting stupid now. I think it may be my hard drive, but I’m not so sure. Here is a quick summary of my specs:
Windows 7 64 bit
6 GB Ram
Intel i7 @ 2.3 GHz
HDD: 500 GB ST750LM022 HN-M750MBB
GPU: Nvidia 660M
So the problem is that I get massive slowdown very frequently. Opening programs, playing any modern games, even switching to a different process (like bringing steam into focus). Here’s the reason I think it’s a hard drive issue, every time I experience slowdown, I’m getting a massive spike on the page faults/sec graph, and the processes that are going non-responsive show anywhere from 15-30 page faults. I’m thinking my disk drive is slow in returning these requests from the RAM. Another reason is that it seems like opening a file explorer takes a long time to open and detect files.
There’s some other issues I can think of.
Just for fun, I ran a registry scanner. It detected 464 issues, but I haven’t looked into that yet, since I’m not sure if I should be taking it seriously, I know lots of registry cleaners just feed you whatever they think will make you satisfied, and I don’t really want to tell it to fix it unless I know they’re legit.
The other problem I can think of is that it’s because my CPU is woefully slow. I think this may be part of my issue with games.
Anyway, here’s what I plan to do tomorrow, if people think it’s a good idea:
make a small ubuntu partition and attempt to boot from there, see if it has the same slowdown
run a pc benchmarker and see what it says.
Thanks for any help. I plan to get a completely new computer soon, but I’d like to use this for as long as I can.
EDIT: I ran a memory diagnostic, and there’s no problems, but it’s still using more memory than what I count. It’s using 4.5x the amount. If I check the resource monitor, I count that it’s reporting 1.5x the amount that I count.
Even in safe mode, it uses 1 GB
Also, still getting that nonresponsiveness and system pausing.
My memory usage suddenly went down to 30%, but I still have issues.
One thing I’m noticing is that it’s taking a shockingly long time to close processes.
ANSWER :
I’m running crystal disk, the read error rate, reallocated sector
counts, seek error and seek time, spin retry counts, are all above the
threshhold, actually I think everything is above the threshold, but
half of those thresholds are 0. Lots of other things seem bad, like
256 uncorrectable sector counts.
This indicates a completely broken hard drive. You should replace it as soon as possible. You should now buy a SSD to get a great performance improvement.
A basic diagnostic step is to check out the Event Log and see if there are any clues as to what may be going wrong during the slowdown periods. To do this, open the “Event Viewer” application and look in the Application and System logs.