The Student Room Group

Dropped my computer - now runs all slow

This is kind of against my intuition, that a hardware shock could bring about software groggyness - but yeah I dropped my computer from a height of about 1.5m, and whilst nothing notably 'broke' the computer's running all slow, it's also crashing a lot more, e.g. when I open word.

My thoughts are either I've corrupted a bunch of data on my hard drive, or I've broken my RAM. Am I right in thinking this and could I test for it in any way?

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Reply 1
Ctrl+Alt+Del and have a look at the processes tab, see if your CPU and memory are all running as they should be.
yup neither is at capacity, CPU usage wavering around 16% with a few apps open, 'commit charge' 353M/ 1087M
just ran a 'windows memory diagnostic' CD which found no faults in RAM
Reply 4
Drop it again and see if it fixes the problem.

Seriously now; does it make any funny noises? You might have made the r/w head crash, in which case your hard disk is probably sh*gged. Do a low-level hard disk check (do it overnight).
yeah it makes some pretty funny noises but they sound more like the fan's come lose than HD clicks if I were to guess

first thing i'm going to do is ghost a copy of my HD! i'd actually just die if i lost my HD contents right now. like actually, goodbye degree.

can you recommend a utility for doing a low level hard disk check?
just ran chkdisk and 'errors found' ... useful
Reply 7
Drop it one more time :biggrin:
Reply 8
gooseymcgoose
yup neither is at capacity, CPU usage wavering around 16% with a few apps open, 'commit charge' 353M/ 1087M

They sound normal. Chkdsk should repair any errors that it finds, so how is it after running that?
chkdisk didn't offer - i'll have a fiddle in a bit, right now I'm just backing up my partitition

cheers

a
Reply 10
gooseymcgoose
chkdisk didn't offer - i'll have a fiddle in a bit, right now I'm just backing up my partitition

cheers

a

It won't offer, it'll just do.
btw - is this really the behaviour one would expect if the HD had been scratched? I'd expect some random files to be corrupted, though it seems like just about anything will work if I give it long enough (though we're talking ten mins to open itunes for example)
SillyFencer
It won't offer, it'll just do.

sorry what I meant by it not offering is that it declared it was in read-only mode and couldn't
Open it up, and see if you've knocked the RAM out of it's slots.
If I right click on my computer, the amount of RAM reported is correct. Could it be slightly knocked out and still doing this?

thanks,

a
Reply 15
ocelotrevs
Open it up, and see if you've knocked the RAM out of it's slots.

Probably a good idea, open it up, check all cards/wires are firmly in place and give it a general clean out.
Reply 16
It is a fairly common probloem, I can't say for sure but it does sound as if you hard drive is damaged. Back it up ASAP.
Reply 17
Hard drive damage can manifest itself in any number of ways, including slow downs. That's quite normal, use a hard drive diagnostics disk to check the physical state of the drive. These are available for download from hard drive manufacturers. Dodgy sectors in the MBR/file table can cause a world of hassle including slow downs, files going missing at random and blue screens.

Chkdisk won't cut it, even if it solves your problems for now they'll return. You need something that physically disables any bad sectors on the drive. Or just a new hard drive.
alanmcg
Hard drive damage can manifest itself in any number of ways, including slow downs. That's quite normal, use a hard drive diagnostics disk to check the physical state of the drive. These are available for download from hard drive manufacturers. Dodgy sectors in the MBR/file table can cause a world of hassle including slow downs, files going missing at random and blue screens.

Chkdisk won't cut it, even if it solves your problems for now they'll return. You need something that physically disables any bad sectors on the drive. Or just a new hard drive.

I am with alanmcg on this, last time my HDD started to go slow it died on me :frown: (luckily I brought it back from the dead for a short enough time to get everything I need off it :biggrin:)
I really appreciate the help with this guys - I've got everything off it that I'd like die today if I lost, but it won't let me ghost the entire partition due to 'bad sectors.'

So further evidence that my HD is going bad, and a challenge to keeping everything. I'd still be pretty gutted if I lost everything on it :|

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