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HP Recommended

@KathyI wrote:

I have an external hard drive (Western Digital, 1 terabyte) that backs up my Seagate hard drive daily.

I'll do a full backup to make sure everything is there. Then I guess get a new hard drive and install it.

Are you, then, saying that you believe this is the crux of all of the computer problems I'm having?

Even though the slowdown was sudden, literally overnight?

So that's it? We are done?


That SEATOOLS software is capable of doing much more than "disk-cloning".

It is capable of extensive diagnosis of Seagate disk-drives.

 

But, if you assume that the Seagate disk-drive now has "very-limited" remaining life, what should you do first:

 

* clone the disk-drive,

* backup the entire disk-drive (which is unlikely to backup "everything" -- namely your installed programs and your settings), and then do the disk-cloning,

 

given that you probably can do just ONE of the above two items.

 

 

After the disk-cloning, running SEATOOLS will [probably] confirm that the Seagate disk-drive is failing.

 

 

But, what is more important to you:

 

* "proving" that the current disk-drive is bad,

* "recovering" from an imminent disk-drive failure, by "cloning" while you still can

 

???

 

I don't think that your problems occurred "overnight".

Unless you ran SPECCY a while ago, and saved the results as "base-line" values, you cannot prove your "overnight" conjecture.

 

HP Recommended

dear mdklassen,

 

Please accept my profuse apologies. Of course you are right and the important thing is to do all I can now before the hard drive fails. You have been a tremendous help to me, MDK! I am very grateful.  My tendency to want everything proven comes from a long history of having been given questionable or just wrong computer "help".  I have learned a lot that way, though. LOL  Needless to say, you have really hung in here with me and have steered me along a great path! I also thank you for introducing me to all of these dandy tools and diagnostics I didn't know about before. 

 

So, I will take your advice and work through the next steps. Kind of scared to try and install a new hard drive. I've done it before but that was around 1989. LOL

 

For the record, I have fixed the lag, slowness and type-ahead buffer problems as of today.  Whether I've solved the display error remains to be seen, but there's a good chance I have. 🙂

 

I'm wondering if you noticed on the reports that my hard drive is running very hot? I clean the vents often because we have cats, but yikes. It was reported to be 140F at the time of the SPECCY report!  Would that mean after the new hard drive and all, I should install a better/different/2nd fan? Or maybe a new hard drive wouldn't run that hot?

 

Again, thank you so very much for all of your help!

 

You are a smart guy and I always love talking with a smart person! LOL

 

Kathy

HP Recommended

> For the record, I have fixed the lag, slowness and type-ahead buffer problems as of today. 

 

How did you do that?

It's possible that Windows is now using different blocks on the disk-drive, and those blocks have fewer (if any) problems.

 

> I'm wondering if you noticed on the reports that my hard drive is running very hot?

> I clean the vents often because we have cats, but yikes. It was reported to be 140F at the time of the SPECCY report! 

 

Both my SSD and my "spinning" disk-drives are at 30 Celsius -- a few degrees warmer than outside my home, today.

That's only 86 Fahrenheit -- certainly not 140 !!!

 

> Or maybe a new hard drive wouldn't run that hot?

 

I think that you're onto something -- the disk-drive is working much harder than usual, due to "retries" when reading or writing.  Turn the computer off. Let it cool for an hour or two. Disconnect from the Internet. Start it up, and run SPECCY, and check the temperature. My expectation is that it will be much less than 140 F.  Without an Internet connection, it cannot "call home" (Windows Update, Adobe Updater, Apple Update, anti-virus update, OneDrive, et cetera) and thus cannot "work" the processor as much.

 

HP Recommended

Hello once again MDK,

 

I ran the SeaTools this afternoon on my hard drive and here are the results, just FYI:

 

1. SMART Test - Pass

2. Short DST - Pass

3.  Short generic - Pass

4.  Long generic - Pass (this one took 4 hours, 11 minutes!)

 

Hard drive size: 1, 982,387,449, 856 b

HD space used:       148,329,500,672

 

How did I resolve the slowness and type-ahead buffer slowness?  I manually looked through files on my hard drive and deleted some 13,166 files! I actually knew what they all were and I left them in the Recycle bin for 2 days to make sure the computer still ran. LOL

 

I think the real culprit though was the LastPass files (that horrid password manager program). I found out yesterday that it doesn't play well with Firefox. It was a bleep to find and get rid of all of the files because even after using its Uninstall, the program still worked!

 

Lastly it wanted the correct display driver.  I got the first display driver error message in early June. I misread the AMD driver version and had been installing, uninstalling and reinstalling the WRONG driver! I happened to think about it 3 days ago and wondered if I'd misread that version number, checked on it, and I had. Now, *finding* the correct driver was a real scavenger hunt! Turned out to be a "Legacy" driver that was buried so deep on the AMD site I had an awful lot of digging to do. But I found it 2 nights ago and installed it yesterday morning.

 

Since then, all is well and back to normal.  I have a little tweaking to do and then to decide if, based on the SeaTools test results, I still need to install that new hard drive right away.

 

Again, you are amazing at this stuff and I am very grateful to you! Thank you once again for all of your diligence, patience with me and knowledge. 🙂

 

Kathy

† The opinions expressed above are the personal opinions of the authors, not of HP. By using this site, you accept the <a href="https://www8.hp.com/us/en/terms-of-use.html" class="udrlinesmall">Terms of Use</a> and <a href="/t5/custom/page/page-id/hp.rulespage" class="udrlinesmall"> Rules of Participation</a>.