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System is Win 7 Home Premium on Dell XPS 8100.

This problem happened about a year ago and a reformat fixed it until now. At some indeterminate time of using my system it will completely slow down. Web pages wont' load, CTRL+ALT+DEL takes a minute or more to bring up the menu. Selecting Task Manager may take another couple minutes to come up.

All the while that this is happening there is a rhythmic and regular hard drive access sound. It's a short 1/2 second hard drive sound, then 2 seconds of nothing, then 1/2 second of hard drive sound, then nothing.

When Task Manager does finally start nothing of interest or unusual shows up in the process list. Malware Bytes says the system is clean. When I reboot (usually having to pull the power plug) it'll run fine again for several days so I don't think it's a physical drive problem (and it passes the manufacturer drive check utility).

I've never been able to get resource monitor to load so while this is happening, so I'm going to just leave it open on a different monitor to try and see what process might be hitting the drive and causing the system to slow down.

VL-80
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Steve
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  • Perhaps what you’re hearing a so-called spin retry of your hard drive. This is a failure indicator. – Daniel B Feb 08 '15 at 14:11
  • Could be a failing hard drive. **Please make a backup immediately**. Then run a smart test on your drive. See [How can I read my hard drive's SMART status in Windows 7?](http://superuser.com/q/29240) – DavidPostill Feb 08 '15 at 14:22
  • Virus/Malware possibly? – Moab Feb 08 '15 at 14:50
  • as stated above back up everything near and dear to you ASAP. you could try to use software like spinrite (www.grc.com) to try to isolate the bad areas but in reality you're probably best moving it to a new hdd (if that is ineed the root cause) – Crash893 Feb 08 '15 at 14:57
  • Is there a program that would let me clone my Win 7 boot drive to a new drive? No idea if I have the Win 7 install media from Dell and would be easier than installing programs from scratch again. – Steve Feb 08 '15 at 15:43

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It certainly sounds as if your hard drive is on its way out. As already mentioned above, back up immediately!

Reinstalling onto a clean drive and manually installing all of the applications you need is cumbersome but will yield a significantly faster, smoother system. You should be able to download any drivers you need from the dell website so you just need the installation media. You could do a clean install and then create a "ghost" image should you need to reinstall again.

To simply clone your existing drive to your new drive, there are lots of available, free programs. http://www.clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live.php is one of the most popular.

Malk
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  • Ordered a 512gb SSD and used the Dell Backup and Recovery to create a factory image recovery on the USB. I'll still need to reinstall some software but luckily most of it is Steam and Adobe Creative Cloud which should all automatically install. – Steve Feb 08 '15 at 17:25