[SOLVED] PC showing signs of failing

[Mistaline]

Hello all,

My girlfriend's PC is (probably) showing signs of hardware failing; but as I'm quite far away and she doesn't have spare parts, I can't really help her with this.

Basically what happened is she downloaded a game on steam and got a corrupt disk error message on steam. After some time she did manage to get the game downloaded, but ever since her pc has been very slow. Booting time increased severely, every single game that ran smooth lags a lot now and games crash frequently. Her memory usage isn't at 100% and the pc has been cleaned recently to rule out overheating.

I tried to help her to the extent of which my knowledge goes; virusscans, updating drivers, defragmentation of the disk, running mdsched.exe, run a wmic check, ran SFC /scannow and cleaned %temp%.

Her pc is a tiny bit faster but still too slow to be calling it functioning propperly.

TL;DR: What else could I make her do from a distance to hopefully increase performance again, or see if there is a hardware issue?

Thanks in advance!

 

[rgd1101]

full system spec? include brand and model of the psu
who full is the ssd?

 

[Mistaline]

Thanks for the quick response.

Specs:
CPU: Intel I5-4460,
Memory: 8GB Ram
GPU: nvidia gtx560ti
Motherboard: ASRock B85 Anniversary

She doesn't have an SSD but an HDD, which is filled as following: C:/ 52GB free of 223GB | E:/ 159GB free of 465GB.

I know her setup is quite outdated, but before the jump is made to; just upgrade the pc, she'd rather only do that if truely necessary since she doesn't have much dime to spare as a student.

 

[Satan-IR]

Wouldn't help running games smoother (in terms of frame rate and such) but the most immediate change that can make the system faster in terms of boot time and game load time and such is to replace the HDD as system and game drive to an SSD.

Also Download and check the drive's SMART (health data) with HD Tune from here or HD Sentinal from here, take a screenshot, upload to imgur.com and post a link here. The tiral version for both are free. If boot time and game loading times have increased suddenly it might be the HDD has issues and/or is failing.

 

[Mistaline]

Yeah I know an SSD would speed it up significantly, but the speed actually never was an issue and it all ran perfectly fine for her (She doesn't play big games, just smaller ones).

Link:

https://imgur.com/a/rxawX7U

View: https://imgur.com/a/rxawX7U

 

[Satan-IR]

As I suspected, this means there was a weak sector, the drives was actualy able to 'read' the data from it and 'write' it to the reserve sectors they have for such occasions and has marked the sector as 'bad'.

This could remain an isolated incident and the drive can continue to function or it might escalate fast and be a sign of imminent failure and the number of bad sectors might increase so fast and so much that it can render the drive dead, beyond possibility of retreiving anything from it.

I suggest immediate backup of any personal and irreplacable files to other media/storage as you can't know when it's going to fail.

Can you check with other software and see if they can actually read the values for those 'Unknown Attributes'?

If you do a surface scan (which beware can actually put pressure and stress the drive in it's current condition) and know where the bad sector is, depending where it is, the drive can be partitioned to avoid the area with the bad sector. this actually makes the head/actuator avoid the platter surface area with problems and in some relatively rare cases the drive can be operable and might live longer.

I personally would backup immediately and then keep an eye on the drive's health to see if it's getting worse or not. If it doesn't get worse after a while I might try the partitioning around the problem area. Maybe it's time for the SSD upgrade after all.

 

[Mistaline]

Thanks for the great help so far. Her father actually has an old HDD so she'll try to see if the slow loading is gone if she uses that HDD, or would you advise against this?

I still have a spare SSD here that I'll give to her once I go back to her, so that should then hopefully resolve her issues.

About the stresstest; I sadly have no idea how to perform one.

 

[Satan-IR]

That shot you uploaded doesn't have the top part of HD Tune so I don't know what this drive with bad sector is, make and model. Also don't know what make model father's old HDD is.

If the other HDD is in good working condition and same speed as this one (e.g. both are 7200RPM) the boot time and game load times can improve on paper if this drive is slowed down because more weak/bad sectors exist on it. The longer boot time can be because the drive tries to correct itselt and move data other possible weak sectors to reserve ones upon a restart/reboot.

What I said above is not a stress test. It's a simple routine surface scan test which can be done by same HD Tune you used to check health too. You have to click on Error Scan tab and you can also check the Quick scan below the Start button. This, however, can stress a sick/failing drive and just push it off the edge if it's just on the verge of failing. I'd do this after necessary data is backed up.

 

[geofelt]

If there is a system restore checkpoint at a time prior to when the issues started, see if you can't restore the system to then.