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

[Fred Hooper]

I use Spin-rite regularly on my Win 7 desktop; Level 2 (read only) 
quarterly for the SSD and Level 4 for the 2TB HD -- the latter takes 6 
days, so I only run it when I'm going out of town.

It kept my wife's laptop running for an extra 2 years (after it began 
slowing down) by running it quarterly at Level 4.

I doubt it would do harm; I've never heard of it doing so.

Best,
Fred
> Tina N Fields <mailto:tinanfields at torchlake.com>
> Saturday, November 11, 2017 4:41 PM
> 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
>