Win 7 lag unusable

[Larommi]

OKay, this one as me stumped.

Win7 64 bit

Laptop is a Vaio with 4 gigs of ram

It lags horribly. The HDD light in constantly on but I don't hear it thrashing.

When I watch the Resource Meter, nothing is making the RAM or CPU spike, and the HDD is barely reading and writing. However, if I try and launch a program, the mouse moves but does not click and eventually the blue circle will come up and spin for a minute or more and I still don't have a spike in CPU, RAM or HDD. It does this in safe mode as well.

I checked the bios to see if there is anything in there but there are no user settings.

I suspect the HDD may be having issues, but what are your thoughts?

Are there any good programs I can put on a USB key to test this system?

I am almost ready to yank the drive and scan it on one of my machines.

[CeeBee]

I'd suspect the hdd/controller/memory.
First to a reset on the BIOS, then run a SMART test. Also a mem test won't hurt. I'm partial to memtest86... it has pointed problems in the past where other tests didn't (and indeed changing the RAM fixed).
Also start with bootlog enabled and take a look for clues.

[Larommi]

I'd suspect the hdd/controller/memory.
First to a reset on the BIOS, then run a SMART test. Also a mem test won't hurt. I'm partial to memtest86... it has pointed problems in the past where other tests didn't (and indeed changing the RAM fixed).
Also start with bootlog enabled and take a look for clues.

Nothing in bootlog.

Nothing really to reset or do in the bios. Being it is a Sony Viao, it is pretty locked down. About the only options even available were to change the time, add a password and change the boot order. I have never seen such a limited bios. I guess Sony does not trust their customers.

I will test the hard drive tonight along with ram. I am leaning towards this being a hardware issue since it is fucked in Safemode. The HDD and OS seem relatively clean. I don't think this laptop saw much use.

One other question. It was using Windows Defender. I thought it might be scanning even though it was disabled, is it possible I am not completely turning it off going through MSConfig? I don't see any running processes but windows assigns generic names to some of its processes and so it may still be scanning, or at least that is my theory.

[Larommi]

By the way, I downloaded http://portableapps.com/ and used their AV. Something Clam. ( I am at work, laptop is at home so not sure of the name). It seems rather limited. Is there a better AV I can run from a thumb drive?

[Larommi]

It appears that the hard drive is puking according to crystaldiskinfo

[Mobile PC]

Run the manufacturers hdd software to confirm.

[Larommi]

Run the manufacturers hdd software to confirm.

I will try. I pulled 3 gigs of photos off to back up the drive last night. That took roughly 2 hours.

I set it up to run scan disk, at hour 1 if found a ton of bad clusters and repaired them. At hour 2 it started checking the disk for free space. At hour 3 I went to bed. I am not sure how long it took but at about hour 5 I woke up to rock a piss and it was still running.

[Larommi]

Run the manufacturers hdd software to confirm.

there was not one for the manufacturer of the drive so i ran Seagates and it failed it too.

Pieced it back together, and it sort of runs. She cannot afford a new drive so I have advised her to not save anything important on it.