hard drive going bad?

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Getonit

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I bought a new Lenovo Thinkpad, as my previous 8-9 y.o. computers no longer wanted to play with all of the new and improved crap that seems to be required these days. I will save that discussion for some other time. Anyway had the computer and was only used casually as I could browse on my ipad, so my son was using it and downloaded some crap for minecraft or something else along the way. Took it to the repair shop and they deleted/corrected the problems supposedly. While there they told me my hard drive was going bad? The computer does seem to take a long time to do something I would consider simple, like open a web page. It seems very random. I think this computer is bleeding edge enough 2.6 ghz and 8 GB of RAM. I don't do anything hard core processing wise with it, but it is almost brand new. Unfortunately it is out of warranty for me to even register a complaint. My question is how do you tell if the HD is really going bad? My opinion is the Microsoft and all of the other vendors put so much crap through poor design it is no wonder the computers don't work.

Please don't tell me to buy an apple, I had one of those and not really impressed, I am not interested in learning UNIX, etc. I am only 44 and very quickly turning into a curmudgeon.
 
1. Go to the device manager and find out what kind of hard drive you have. You might have to Google some obscure designation to discover the mfr.

2. Go to the mfr's support page and download a diagnostic tool and run it. Eg, Seagate below:
http://www.seagate.com/support/internal-hard-drives/laptop-hard-drives/momentus-thin/

ps, hard drives can last quite a long time, even 10 years or more. If your computer is running slow, it is most likely just clogged with crap. I use ccleaner to clean the registry of all unneeded stuff but if the hard drive diagnostic says it is good and ccleaner does not help then I would reinstall the OS before replacing a hard drive.
 
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Getonit said:
I bought a new Lenovo Thinkpad, as my previous 8-9 y.o. computers no longer wanted to play with all of the new and improved crap that seems to be required these days. I will save that discussion for some other time. Anyway had the computer and was only used casually as I could browse on my ipad, so my son was using it and downloaded some crap for minecraft or something else along the way. Took it to the repair shop and they deleted/corrected the problems supposedly. While there they told me my hard drive was going bad? The computer does seem to take a long time to do something I would consider simple, like open a web page. It seems very random. I think this computer is bleeding edge enough 2.6 ghz and 8 GB of RAM. I don't do anything hard core processing wise with it, but it is almost brand new. Unfortunately it is out of warranty for me to even register a complaint. My question is how do you tell if the HD is really going bad? My opinion is the Microsoft and all of the other vendors put so much crap through poor design it is no wonder the computers don't work.

Please don't tell me to buy an apple, I had one of those and not really impressed, I am not interested in learning UNIX, etc. I am only 44 and very quickly turning into a curmudgeon.
Click to expand...

If you are seeing random errors, slowdowns, slow boots etc. thats the hard drive. Just replace it, they are cheap.
 
I've had drives last ten years. And I've had two die recently that were less than two years old (both had one year warranties, of course!) If in doubt, just replace it. They are relatively cheap...especially compared to your time trying to rebuild your data after a crash. If it proves to be a software issue, at least you'll be troubleshooting it on a new drive. Put the original drive in an external case and use it for offline storage.
 
If you don't need a huge drive consider getting a solid state drive. It will be both faster and more reliable.
 
FormerHangie said:
If you don't need a huge drive consider getting a solid state drive. It will be both faster and more reliable.
Click to expand...
Or one better, a hybrid drive. I just got a Western Digital that combines a 120G SSD and a 1T harddrive. It was about $200 with free shipping.
 
Not enough detail to give you an answer, but extremely unlikely it's the fault of Minecraft. It could be your hard drive, but it could also just be an issue with Windows or malware messing crap up.

I would suggest you go buy a SSD (I refuse to use computers without SSDs anymore) and install a fresh copy of Windows on it. You should be set then.
 
SSD

Also what do you do where 2.6ghz and 8gb ram are hardly enough?!
 
To clarify, my son was downloading something for minecraft and downloaded malware of some kind, I took it to the repair shop to have the garbage removed and that is when I was told the HD was going bad. Which led me to making this post. I am just curious as the machine is fairly new and not used 24x7.

Regarding my statement of machine specs, I have no idea what is cutting edge or even adequate anymore reason I stated the specs. I recall doing research and picked this computer as a mid price, between low end and high end, not scientific but it seems to work generally for most of my purchases. 15 years ago I used to do SAP software development and could talk about this stuff, now I just want it to work.

Also running windows 7.
 
I use CrystalDiskInfo to keep tabs on my drives. Don't have to use any specific one, all it does is pull the SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) info off your drives but it's free and presents itself in a decent format. Just ignore the anime-ish character on it :yes:

http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html

The one I use at home is the Shizuku edition I believe, but the standard version will probably suit your needs.

//edit
Also MalwareBytes and SuperAntiSpyware are two great free programs for general upkeep and removal of malware and spyware. There have been few things that my parents have managed to get on the computer that I couldn't remove with the assistance of MalwareBytes.

https://www.malwarebytes.org/

http://www.superantispyware.com/

(Yeah, superantispyware looks and sounds suspiciously like a virus itself but I have been using it for years)
 
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