Hard Drive working hard at random times

[Trevor Price]

Hello

I wonder if anyone can help me out -- I'm pretty new to computing.

I've got a Packard Bell laptop used for business at home, running Vista. I've got broadband, but I don't leave this on when I'm not using the computer, which I hibernate. I've got Microsoft Security Essentials, kept up to date, and I've recently run a full scan without any result.

The problem is that the hard drive will start working very hard, so that explorer, or any other program, will run slowly, or even freeze. This happens at quite random times and doesn't seem related to anything I'm doing on the computer. It lasts up to five minutes, though it is often less. Afterwards, the computer runs as normal, but sometimes, email addresses, which appear automatically in the mail web page (for tiscali and yahoo mail), will disappear.

Sometimes Microsoft updates appear, so I presume this making the hard drive work too, but again, this is only rarely the case.

My queston is -- is this some kind of Vista housekeeping going on in the background? Or is the computer being hacked.

 

[IAntDemo]

This sounds really strange and could be a bad sector in your harddrive, about being hacked, most email companys have a software that will tell you when you log in to your email that your email as been logged in on other computers while your on, I know this because I've been hacked via gmail and gmail told me as I logged in that my email was being used else where and someone had access to it, so I think they'd alarm you..

Lets do some tests shall we to see if the harddrive is ok.. could be the oprating system, maybe a corrupted file which commenly causes freezes, also you could be correct about a hidden software in the background..

Lets start

Goto Start, goto run, or alternatively press windows key and R key and run command will prompt.. type CMD and press enter, you should see a black screen appear, in the command prompt you need to type CHKDSK /R this will cheak your harddrive for errors, if it asks for admin rights, just search command prompt on your windows and right click and 'run as admin' and then repeat above..

If no problems found try downloading a program called:

CCleaner - Download CCleaner 3.12.1572 - FileHippo.com

Top right corner download and install..

After this clean the computer with CCleaner and then click registry in CCleaner and give it a fix issues in registry (scan computer)

Have it fix all issues, this hopefully will fix the computer as you could have a few bad .dll files and hopefully CCleaner fixes it.

Get back to me please if this hasn't been fixed or if it has please post anyway so google searches can get this info and have it solved from others also

 

[Trevor Price]

Hello

Thanks for your reply and your time.

I ran chkdsk -- no problem. CCleaner found about 190 problems, many with .dll files and fixed them. As the problem is sporadic, I'll wait a few days and then post to confirm whether the problem has been resolved or not.

Once again, thanks!

 

[IAntDemo]

no problem, I can bet it most likely did fix it, 190problems is a hell of a mess lol

 

[officemanager1]

Hello

I wonder if anyone can help me out -- I'm pretty new to computing.

I've got a Packard Bell laptop used for business at home, running Vista. I've got broadband, but I don't leave this on when I'm not using the computer, which I hibernate. I've got Microsoft Security Essentials, kept up to date, and I've recently run a full scan without any result.

The problem is that the hard drive will start working very hard, so that explorer, or any other program, will run slowly, or even freeze. This happens at quite random times and doesn't seem related to anything I'm doing on the computer. It lasts up to five minutes, though it is often less. Afterwards, the computer runs as normal, but sometimes, email addresses, which appear automatically in the mail web page (for tiscali and yahoo mail), will disappear.

Sometimes Microsoft updates appear, so I presume this making the hard drive work too, but again, this is only rarely the case.

My queston is -- is this some kind of Vista housekeeping going on in the background? Or is the computer being hacked.

Next time when your Laptop experiences your problem just run Task manager to see which program/application is causing the problem...