can anyone help.. my laptop is 4 years oldish.. recently it crashed and i had to totally restore via c.d.. it has since crashed about 5 or 6 times and everytime i have restored and it works fine. altho this time.. startup takes around 15 minutes.. and when it finally does it lags badly for about 10 minutes before i can use it, as i am on it now. is there any other way i can totally reboot the comp or is the hard drive knackered.. or how do i test it to find out..
To test your hardware, you can use a linux livecd. This will run an operating system without installing on your hard drive. If it runs excellent from the linux livecd then your hard drive might be going bad. Have you defrag your hard drive? how full is that drive? But if it's the original drive it might be time to replace it after 4 years. Laptop drives are cheap nowadays. You can use freeware to backup your current drive before it fails completely. Macrium reflect/paragon drivebackup express/driveimage xml.
