as of lately there seems to be a lag in everything i do on my computer. wether its chatting , browsing, watching movies, listening to music. there always seems to be a slight pause or lag from time to time.  my computer professor told me that my harddrive might be dying out. and well i just wanna know if thats truly the case. because i dont wanna cough up another 80 bucks for another 20GB harddrive. and well i dont have the money for that right now.

but do you guys think it could be something else? i mean i dont have Kazaa Lite running anymore and so far its been more or less fine. but when i start chatting with a couple of people there tends to be a lag. as well as browsing the net. i mean it doesnt happen all the time but often enough to have me have concerns.

should i be worried or not?

any input from anyone would be greatly appereciated.

I don't personally agree with that conclusion.  Impending hard-drive failures (in my experience) are accompanied by funny/different mechanical noises.

Your symptoms indicate anything from software (drivers needing updates, background services hogging CPU cycles, that sort of thing) to hardware (heat build-up, power supply problems) but I certainly would not account for the misbehaviour exclusively to the 'hard drive'.

Try an experiment: If you have system restore working for you and you can recall when the PC started slowing down, choose a restore point before that and see what happens (remember, you can always 'unrestore' it).  Further, if you've seen many of the other links talk about providing a 'Hijack This!' log, that coould assist us in trying to uncover the source of your grief.

As a minimum, make sure you have done an active virus scan with updated virus definition files in your anti-virus application, scan for spyware and remove it, scan for ad-ware and remove, perhaps a little defrag action, and maybe that will clean up the PC's act a little!

ive done two online virus scans, both turned out fine. i made a system restore before this started happening. i restored it and same symptoms. i cleaned out my registry , cause theres lots of useless entries from old programs that have been uninstalled. i use ad-aware and nothing looks suspicious.

the CPU seems to be used up quite a bit. i have 640MB of RAM. i havent had kazaa lite running for a couple of days. and things arent as bad as before. but the symptom is still there. ive defragged my computer twice. cause i had lots of movies and stuff that were like 600MB each so once i transfered those to cd. i defragged . but now everytime i go to defrag it says i should. but theres not much of a change. it says certain files could not be defragmented and well its movies that it cant move. so it doesnt seem like something suspicous going on there. except everytime i analyze the drive it says i should defragment. yet not much of defragging goes on each time. 

and well i dunno what it could be. im more or less a novice computer user. but ive never had a drive go out on me before while its being used. so i dunno what the symptoms are. when its quiet all i hear from the PC is the fan, i dont hear any clicking or clanking noises going on.

there are times when i have the computer on like 3 days at a time or longer. could it be that me leaving the computer on for many days at a time cause this?

• You said your cpu usage is high - look in Task Manger under the cpu column and see what process is using the cycles.


• It's very irresponsible of your professor (such as he is) to suggest something as drastic as a dying hard drive without first recommending some tests you can run or steps to take to try to eliminate the problem. Hard drives do die, but that's probably the least likely cause of problems such as yours.