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.