[dba-Tech] hard drive failure - maybe - diagnostic

[Tina N Fields]

Is Spin-rite still a good tool to use to diagnose potential hard drive 
failure, for a Win 7 laptop?

My son-in-law has a Win 7 Dell Vostro 3500, vintage 2010. It has 
recently become extremely slow, taking upwards of 10 minutes to boot, 
and over 5 minutes to launch programs. Malware-bytes finds no threats. 
It's been routinely defragged. Until sometime in the recent past, it was 
using a VPN to remote into the home office out in Beverly, 
Massachusetts. The company switched to putting everything in the cloud 
sometime in the last couple years (I think).

I had installed Vipre on it from my subscription, but the IT guys in the 
home office wanted everyone to have the same anti-virus tool, so they 
uninstalled Vipre and installed their AVG. They also controlled all the 
Windows updates.

I looked at this computer yesterday, and found no anti-virus protection 
on it, the Windows update feature disabled, and Windows Defender 
firewall off. I think this box has been left unprotected since the 
company put everything in the cloud. My son-in-law believed that the IT 
guys were still taking care of his protection and updates. Since they 
are no longer connected via VPN, I'm thinking that just isn't true.

So, I looked through the processes running and the start-up items. There 
were three identical Intel entries in the start-up; I unchecked two of 
them, which did speed up the boot process a bit. It had been over 15 
minutes before.

As slow as it is to launch a browser, once the browser is up, accessing 
web pages is right up to speed.

We did download and run Malware-Bytes, which found no threats.

I discovered he didn't have a recent backup of his data, so, he spent 
yesterday evening and some of today doing that.

I'm noodling away on this and wondering if the problem is a failing hard 
drive.

So, any other thoughts? And is there any other diagnostic software I 
should bring to bear on this problem?

Thanks

-- 
Tina Norris Fields
231-322-2787
tinanfields-at-torchlake-dot-com