[buckdog05]

I am working on a laptop that was very slow and seemed to have a rogue antivirus program on it.

I tried installing the normal scanning software, but the computer kept rebooting and freezing during the install and scan so I figured I'd just back up the data and run the HP recovery wizard to bring it back to the factory condition.

I did this, and it's faster than it was before, but every three minutes or so, everything will freeze up and it takes it a minute to unfreeze.

I tried running chkdsk (it made me restart and ran before Windows started), but it got stuck on the last step and hung at 59% for hours so I did a hard shut down and rebooted into Vista.

I am thinking that the hard drive is prob bad but wanted to get a second opinion.

Thanks!

[jaclaz]

Usually problems with hard drives are "binary": 0 or 1, works or crashes.

The freezing and later unfreezing appears more like a badly configured software/service.

However, once you run chkdisk, you should run it until completion, or, if you need to shutdown the PC re-run it afterwards immediately.

Start your PC, run chkdisk, then, once it has finished it's job, start Task Manager and check which processes eat up too much CPU (and possibly cause the freezing)...

jaclaz

[buckdog05]

I just ran Chkdsk again, and this time it froze at 67% of "checking free space."

I'll try to see if an app is taking up lots of CPU, but I doubt it as I just recovered system to factory condition (twice).

Thanks!

[buckdog05]

Ok, it just froze again (after skipping chkdsk after another reboot), and the CPU usage is at 4%. This thing is driving me nuts!

[jaclaz]

OK, now it's time to test your hard disk.

You can try getting the HD Manufacturer testing tool or try using this:
http://hddguru.com/c...nt/en/software/

MHDD):
http://hddguru.com/c...005.10.02-MHDD/

jaclaz

[buckdog05]

jaclaz, on Nov 11 2008, 04:28 AM, said:

OK, now it's time to test your hard disk.

You can try getting the HD Manufacturer testing tool or try using this:
http://hddguru.com/c...nt/en/software/

MHDD):
http://hddguru.com/c...005.10.02-MHDD/

jaclaz

Thanks. So a bad HD could be causing the frezing frequent reboots?