Hard Drive Lag

[NY415]

Hey guys,

I've been having computer lag for pretty much everything. I can't play video games anymore, can't watch movies from my hard drive, anything i do is laggy.

I don't really know what kind of information you guys need as I don't know too much about computers, but I have:

HP Pavilion dv 7 Notebook PC
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M 430 @ 2.27 GHz (4CPUs), ~2.3GHz
4096MB Ram
Page file: 3248 MB used, 4795 MB available
NVidia GeForce G105M (downloaded most recent driver)

When I boot up my computer I sometimes get this warning for me to do a hard disk scan, but when i run it it stays at 0% and won't go anywhere. I have to boot up and skip past it to use my computer.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. If you need any more information please let me know how to find you that information and i will get it to you as soon as possible!

 

[nutcase_63]

To start with,start the computer in safe mode (toggle the f8 key while starting your pc) and try to run the hard disk scan then.
Most likely cause of this prob (first impression) is a very fragmented disk with allocation errors on it,so the scan will prob fix this.
Second,scan it for virusses (you can most likely do this also in safemode if you own a scanner that is),if it remains problematic try using the mastercd wich you may own.

 

[blackhawk1928]

First boot into safe-mode. Do a disk scan to correct file system errors. Then degragment your HDD completely. Then to a virus scan. It should help a lot. Using a good registry cleaner should also help if you have installed/uninstalled lots of programs.

 

[NY415]

When I boot up the laptop in safe mode the option for the disk scan does not come up anymore. Do I need to hit something while safe mode is loading? Sorry I'm not very good with this kind of stuff! Currently running the antivirus in safe mode. Also if I defray the computer will i lose all of my data? Thanks again

 

[blackhawk1928]

Go to my computer>right click on your hard drive>properties>toosl-tab>disk-check

Defragmentation does not delete any data.

 

[NY415]

Thanks, I just ran the disk check. Not sure what the results were since i left it on and the computer had restarted itself when I came back. I will defrag it tonight and see what happens.

 

[apache_lives]

run hardware tests

hdtune to test the hdd - surface scan

 

[NY415]

Hey, black hawk I defragged and everything and I think it worked! I haven't had the time to play any video games or watch any movies, but the computer seems to be running better all so I am pretty happy. Tonight I'll test it out and let you know, but THANK YOU!

apache thanks for the input i'll try that out as well if something is still off. How do i do that test?

 

[blackhawk1928]

Yeah, in Microsoft operating systems, defragmentation is a huge problem due to the file system. NTFS isn't very good with cleaning up after itself. It can access certain clusters of a file, however once it is finished with them, instead of neatly organizing them consecutively, it scatters them all over the magnetic platter. Due to latency in access times of the platter since its mechanical, defragmentations causes huge slowdown.

To solve the problem of defragmentation, you either need to change to a different file system such as the one that Linux and Apple OS use which work entirely different or use an SSD for storage.

Another side note, the windows defragmenter is *okay*, but if you want more thorough and faster program at defragmentation, there are plenty of free third party programs far superior to the windows standard defrag tool.

-Auslogics
-Ultimate Defrag
-Smart Defrag

 

[NY415]

Shoot it's not fixed =/. When i play video games it still goes from like 60fps to 1-10 fps every 15 secs. I'll try usin the other defrag tools but i'm not sure if that's it

 

[NY415]

Well actually maybe that video game problem isn't due to my hard drive because the error doesn't come up when i start up my comp. My graphics card is updated and i have plenty of ram. I have no idea what the problem is now

 

[blackhawk1928]

Are you sure your fps drops are not during intense graphic scenes like combat...usually if you are in a small landscape with little action, fps will be higher then when you got outside and into action, because the GPU must render much more stuff.

 

[NY415]

I used to run the game on high graphics with no problem at all. Now I've dropped the visual quality to the second lowest setting and am still getting huge fps drops. I updated my graphics card driver and all that. Very confused

 

[tsnor]

Suggest you use the win 7 performance monitor to see what is going on when you start lagging. Launch from the performance tab of task manager. The disk section will tell you how many IOs and IO service times. The CPU will tell you if you have other processes using up the CPU. The network section tells you almost nothing unless you are running an online interactive game. The memory/paging section tells you if something is using all your memory.

At the 50K foot level, if the disk light is on solid when you lag then running disk diagnostics is a good idea. If the disk light is flickering or off then focus on what (other than your game) is running.

Before you do anything drastic (like ejecting PC from window) suggest you wipe out your current system by re-installing windows and reloading games. There are so many bad installer/uninstallers out there that PC accumlate garbage and eventually some debris is left that causes bad things to happen. Not to mention possible malicious stuff which attacks on a much more limited front.

Your doc wull tell you have to do a restore to factory defaults. Note you can make a backup before you do the restore if you think you might foret to move an important file off the laptop -- all data on the laptop is toast after the restore).

 

[NY415]

Hey, so I've taken all of these steps, defragged using a 3rd party program and all that, but to no avail, so I came across this program called Hard Disk Sentinel, a multi-OS SSD and HDD monitoring and analysis software. I ran the trial version and this is what it came up as.

Performance = 100%
Health = 18%

There are 146 bad sectors on the disk surface. The contents of these sectors were moved to the spare area.
Based on the number of remapping operations, the bad sectors may form continuous areas.
There are 2 weak sectors found on the disk surface. They may be remapped any time in the later use of the disk.
At this point, warranty replacement of the disk is not yet possible, only if the health drops further.
It is recommended to examine the log of the disk regularly. All new problems found will be logged there.

It is recommended to backup immediately to prevent data loss.


The disk activity % reader from the program that came with smart defrag is also telling me that the disk activity continuously hits 100% even though i'm not doing anything.

Do I need a new hard drive or is there a way to fix this?

 

[NY415]

Best answer selected by NY415.

 

[crap_55]

Do I need a new hard drive or is there a way to fix this?

NY415,

You ABSOLUTELY need a new hard drive!!!

Every time Windows tries to read a bad sector, it will cause the OS to freeze for 2-3 seconds. The only way to fix this is to replace the drive.

Cheers.