Hi.

I've noticed lately my computer seems more sluggish moving around the OS and loading screens seem to linger a longer than they used to. Unless I'm mistaken these things are dictated by the hard drive so I figured I'd sort out whats up. My hard-drive as admittedly chockers at the moment (about 100 gigs free out of 931 total) but I'm not so sure that'd be the cause (if my totally wrong here, let me know). I ran CHDSK and it gave me a thumbs up.

After some googling I've branched out into some 3rd party disk checking software, the issue is it's quite difficult for me to tell what would actually help me considering it's mostly "Top 10 Hard-drive checkers of 2013". I tried HDDScan and I am not above admitted I have no idea how to use that thing at all. The documentation wasn't particularly helpful in working it out either. So I went to the most idiot proof sounding program in the list and used that which ALSO gave me a thumbs up.

I haven't ruled out that my drive is just getting old but wouldn't one of these pieces of software tell me that?

So that leads me to here. What disk checking/health/diagnostic software do you guys personally use?

If those diagnostics are coming out okay, your drive is good. Usually if something were wrong, you'd be seeing bad sectors or something similar.

When was the last time you ran a defrag on the drive, and when was the last time you used a Registry cleaner? It's entirely possible that the drive is fine, but just fragmented to hell and full of bad/old registry keys. How old is the computer?

Clean out your PC with some canned air. Sometimes this can be caused by your CPU overheating from dust build up. Pay special attention to any dust built up under your CPU fan on top of your heat sink. It's easy to miss and you may have to remove the fan to clean it out (be careful if you do need to do this as you don't need to remove the heat sink, just the fan).

It could also be a RAM issue if there's nothing wrong with your hard drive. Although, if it's RAM you'll experience odd crashes all the time. I'd recommend mostly cleaning out the dust in your computer as that is often the culprit.

If it's not a physical issue then it could be a virus or some other kind of malware. After blowing out your PC and cleaning any dust out you may also want to run an AV and Spyware check. Can also run one of those cleaners, too, that check for unnecessary programs running in the back ground. CCleaner can be good for that.

I would suspect just loosing performance to age of OS install/cluttered registry and stuff. CCleaner can help some with that. When I had a HDD fail, I would get some random lock ups of the whole computer and it took me a while to figure out what the problem was. Eventually it gave me a SMART error at startup, and I knew that's why the computer had been hanging up a lot. Turns out video card drivers on a failing HDD cause some problems.

If it's just slowness, and not crashes, I would suspect either just a good cleaning of the drive with something like CCleaner would help a lot, or perhaps you have some viruses/rogue programs using CPU cycles and eating into your ram. I'd start by running a full scan with the AV program of your choice, as well as something like Malwarebytes, and then follow up with CCleaner. See what that does for you and go from there. Also make sure your fans are clean and functional, and that the case is relatively free of dust.

You may want to look into your page file size and see if the slowness you're experiencing is related to that. Try setting it to 2x installed RAM and see if that improves anything.

What the guys above me said, plus the fact that most harddrives last for around 2-3 years. Even if the diagnostics are coming up clean, if your HDD is around 2 and 1/2 years old you might want to put some thought to its replacement.

Don't know if that applies to SSD's though, I've never had one.

If it is a HDD and not a SSD, and it is older than 2 years, you would be getting into replacement territory. CHKDSK isn't always very reliable with diagnosing a failing drive. Usually, if CHKDSK finds an issue, the sectors are already bad.

If the issue is loading times in games and applications, it may just be an issue with too much running, too much installed, fragmentation, etc. But, if you open a folder in Windows and it takes it longer than a few seconds, and Explorer locks up for a few seconds while loading anything in your file system, that's an issue. If it's opening files and folders, it's likely time to replace the drive.

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I popped the side off and it is looking dusty in there so I might just run through all the suggestions as none are really very taxing.

@hayt: If stuff is overheating from poor cooling performance, that would do it. Something like HWMonitor can help give you temperature information

I like using Speedfan, however nowadays getting speedfan on your computer is like walking through a landmine of crapware.

However, it'll pull temps off every sensor it can find. It'll also report your drive SMART status.

Also, if you haven't done so... defrag your hard drive. Unless you have a SSD. Then -never- defrag your hard drive.