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Steve Smith
I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop with an IBM Travelstar hard drive running Windows XP Home that suddenly started working EXTREMELY SLOWLY. It was like running XP on an old 386 with 16MB memory. The computer has a 1Ghz CPU and 256MB memory. It took 10 to 15 minutes to open MS Word. Sometimes it takes 5 minutes for the menu to appear after I click on the Start button. It'd take it almost 15 minutes to boot!
I tried every fix imaginable and I finally determined that the hard drive is bad. I made this determination by "Ghosting" to a different hard drive and then replacing the suspect drive with the Ghosted drive. It runs great with the new hard drive. For whatever reason the old hard drive passed Dell's diagnostic program for this laptop, PC Certify diagnostic software and the IBM's "Fitness Test" hard drive diagnostics. I even did a low level format and a clean install of Windows but that didn't help. A replacement hard drive worked like a charm. I guess you can't always trust hard drive diagnostic software.
Perhaps it's possible for a hard drive to slow down because of mechanical reasons maybe due to bad bearings or something and maybe this doesn't get tested by drive diag software or "SMART" analysis. Has anyone seen this problem before?
Steve Smith
I tried every fix imaginable and I finally determined that the hard drive is bad. I made this determination by "Ghosting" to a different hard drive and then replacing the suspect drive with the Ghosted drive. It runs great with the new hard drive. For whatever reason the old hard drive passed Dell's diagnostic program for this laptop, PC Certify diagnostic software and the IBM's "Fitness Test" hard drive diagnostics. I even did a low level format and a clean install of Windows but that didn't help. A replacement hard drive worked like a charm. I guess you can't always trust hard drive diagnostic software.
Perhaps it's possible for a hard drive to slow down because of mechanical reasons maybe due to bad bearings or something and maybe this doesn't get tested by drive diag software or "SMART" analysis. Has anyone seen this problem before?
Steve Smith