Is hard drive shot? (W98)

[bdonahue]

My roomate has a Gateway Pentium 1, that is approx 7 years old. Came with 95, upgradd to 98 SE. It's 200 mghrtz, 32 megs of ram, 4 meg video Card and a 3 gig hard drive. He *thinks* his hard drive is going bad becaue it's moving so slow, but only on certain programs. Someone told me once that my hard drive was going bad', but it turned out that wasn't the case at all. Are there any 'tests' he can perform online so see what the real problem is? He scan disks, defrags, emty's caches etc. on a regular basis. Any idea what the problem might be?
Thanks,
Beth in Nshville

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The Most Boring Woman in America!

www.bethdonahue.com

[JakeHaze]

7 years is an awfully long time for a hard drive. It is a collection of moving parts of machinery. They're rated in number of hours of usage. Look it up and see if it's near the end of its projected life-cycle.

[Andy-S]

Beth,

What's the type and manufacturer of the hard drive? If the hard drive is 3GB then it's not going to be 7 years old as the standard shipping drives 4 years ago were only 2GB.

There are many different utilities for testing drives but the drive manufacturers utilities are the best ones to use. Let us know the manufacturer and I'll see if I can locate a utility for the drive.

You will get the manufacturers details from msinfo32.exe or device manager.

Cheers
Andy

[mayton82]

I know of a program that might be worth taking a look at. The name of the program is spinrite http://grc.com Try taking a look at that program, it is rather good at safely low level formatting your hard drive and if you cant afford the program $40+ bootleg it off a p2p program. Mayton82