Hard drive constantly grinding!

[osprey4]

My son's Dell Dimension 4550 (P4-2.0, 512MB, XP home, 80GB + 30GB) seems to be running slowly of late. He's complaining that the hard drive is constantly grinding (reading/writing) and that he can't do anything in Windows Explorer without a significant delay.

I'm thinking this might be a defrag problem or that some other disk optimization utility would help.

Any suggestions? We have Norton utilities so Speeddisk is an option, but I've heard a lot of complaints about it so I'm reluctant to try.

Can anyone recommend something else?

[Telexen]

Have you defraged the hard drive?
The problem with Norton products is, they literally take over a system once they're installed. Norton Utilities should have a Disk Doctor program that could be of use to you...just make sure you get rid of it when you're done.

do you have the restore option enabled?

[osprey4]

Yes, I think he said he was going to run restore tonight. He did recently install some crudware that took a lot of doing to uninstall and eliminate (there's a post around here somewhere about it).

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article07-035

maybe this could help?

[osprey4]

That advice applies to 9x, but does it work for XP?

[Gait_Keeper]

scandisk and defrag built in to winXP, I use norton speed disk and like it, there are other utilities to defrag with, just find one you like or use norton since you already have it

you can also set your swap file to 1 1/2 times your physical memory, to cut down on windows using your hard drive as RAM

[Gait_Keeper]

defrag using XP

http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/w...402424,00.html

I hope this helps

[Emc2]

Hopefully, you don't have the hard-drive burn virus. It's a virus that spins the hard drive up and read/writes to the same physical spot on the drive. After 30/40 minutes of this, the higher RPM drives (7200-10k) can catch on fire, especially in a poorly vented case. I know it exists, because one of my client's machines caught on fire from it .

It's extremely easy to detect with AV software, or from the fact that the hard drive is constantly grinding away. My client says that she saw one of those pop-up spam things that comes through windows msgsys.exe, and then a little while later it started. However, she let me check her web-email from my computer, and Norton caught *a* virus immediately.

I doubt this is what you have, but keeping the case cool for now would generally be a good idea. Even if it's not this virus, the added heat from the hard drive isn't good for the processor, and DELL computers are well known to be "quiet", aka no case fans...

[MD1032]

I don't know what the heck's going on with my computer. I have defragged it weekly since I've gotten it. I've run norton and it doesn't pick up anything. Ad-aware and spybot have removed everything. Let me explain the problem. It's basically the fact that the computer is VERY SLOW. For example, if I open up basically any program my noisy hard drive (Maxtor 80 MB ultra w/8MB cache) will start doing it's usual ERRRT ERRRT CRUNCH CRUNCH ERRRT ERRRRT sound and load it, except it will take about 2 minutes. In fact, it takes about 2 minutes to load anything, including a simple MP3 fle. IE doesn't take long and it's still running fine but everything seems laggy. I'm going to run system restore right now to see if that fixes it. I hope I won't lose any recently downloaded MP3's.

edit: WHOA!! Back up! Before I do this system restore I'd like to defrag my hard drive. For some unknown reason the thing looks like it's been FRAGMENTED or something. Everything is red and it's all over the place. What a mess. I must try this first.