Possible hard drive problem?

[redfish]

Hi everybody, my dad's laptop recently started acting up and I cannot find the problem. He tells me that he opened a file one of his chinese cousins sent him and that's approximately the time when it started malfunctioning. The first and most obvious symptom was that the text would randomly and suddenly switch to what looks like an asian character system while he was typing, and there was no way to reverse it. What I noticed was that the machine started to run veeery, veeeeeeery slowly. It's a new(ish), fast i5 computer and we don't use it for gaming or anything, so it shouldn't be running this slowly. It used to run quite well. If I open up perfmon the CPU usage is at a low normal level, and so is the pagefile usage. I re-ran windows experience assessment to try and check if it was a hardware problem, and everything turned up normal. Whenever we try and run a virus check, it will become stuck and freeze on a certain language.dll file in the programs(x86) folder. I can't figure out what's causing this malfunction.

I posted this in the hardware section because a) I didn't know where else to put it, it's not necessarily a windows error nor a virus. and b) I suspect that it may be a hard drive problem.
Occasionally, when the hard drive starts spinning, it'll make either a rumble noise or a noise like something getting caught in a fan. A few days ago it did the latter, and dad thought it was a foreign object caught in the CPU fan. There's no way this is true, as if an object was caught in the CPU fan for that long (several minutes) it would overheat and shut down. That left the only other moving part in the machine, the hard drive.

Any help? Any suggestions? Any clues as to what is causing this?

 

[MindoverMaster]

The hard drive clicking, you mean? That is a HDD death sentence. Back it up and get a new drive.

 

[redfish]

Some internal error with the hard drive cause all of our backup attempts to fail. I went through and ran a kernel memory scan, and then a disk check which I was previously unable to complete, and this time I did successfully run it. It moved some files, deleted a couple of corrupt files, and fixed some memory clusters. It is now running at closer to normal speed than before, and we successfully ran a virus check without the usual hangups. I hope that fixed it.

As for the hard drive, that was my initial reaction too. As soon as I recognized the sound, I tried to run a backup in case it broke. It failed, and it's been a couple weeks since it made the noise first, it's happened maybe one-three times since. Because it hasn't died on us yet, I was hopeful that it might not need replacing.

 

[redfish]

I just installed the McAfee on my computer, and now it's doing the same thing. The bizarre thing is that my cpu/hard drive/memory usage are all at normal levels, but it's acting like i'm overloading it.

 

[MindoverMaster]

Get a new hard drive.

 

[redfish]

Both of us? or just the laptop? My desktop hard drive is fine- no noise issues. It's the speed that's worrying me. After a certain amount of time it'll just freeze and I can't even shut it down- either it'll display a blurred screen or it'll say "shutting down" for longer than I can wait (half an hour+). I'm going to run a memory scan through cmd and then run the anti-virus, folder by folder.

 

[redfish]

I contacted customer support. They said that there is a known issue with the 64-bit win7 OS, and that I should re-install the product in a few weeks. As I hit restart to run another chkdsk scan, I got a BSOD. I wrote down the code this time, if anyone can help:
SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION
STOP: 0x0000003B
(0x00000000C0000005, 0xFFFFF800033296C0, 0xFFFFF8800B343C60, 0x0000000000000000)
I looked at the decoding STOP codes sticky, it said that this is often a result of hardware failure. Can this be also as a result of software failure?
(BTW I think that my previous BSODs were caused by the same driver issues as my white and black screens)

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Software rarely causes blue screens, drivers/hardware are more likely to cause it. Go through and update the drivers on the machine with the BSOD.

Also, if your machine is slow after installing an AV program, it isn't the hardware, the software just slows down machines due to real time scanning, also, mcafee is known to be junky/clunky compared to a lot of free alternatives.

 

[MindoverMaster]

I use Comodo, can't be happier.

 

[redfish]

I have been constantly monitoring the drivers for my system as I have had numerous painful issues with the graphics. My current configuration seems to be working fine in terms of drivers, as I have not had any definite driver issues in a while. My computer has been stable after uninstalling McAfee, so I'm fairly certain that this is one of those rare exceptions where software is causing BSODs.
I am fairly certain that I can prove that the issue was NOT slow performance caused by system resource use. Like I said, the perfmon indicated that all system components were at normal usage (CPU at 10%, RAM at ~50%, etc.). The computer just started to behave very bizarrely. Programs, especially Skype, Google Chrome, Itunes, and McAfee, froze. When I opened task manager and manually terminated the processes, they didn't terminate. If I reacted quickly enough and told it to shut down, it would either give me a frozen blurred screen, make all the desktop icons blow up to twice normal size, or just be stuck trying to close background programs. If I tried to run something that needed security permission, like cmd, it would freeze on the "flicker" and permission page. This all happened after about five-seven minutes after startup. I tried using splashtop and it immediately shut off and rebooted, a phenomenon I have not witnessed since the original issues when I first built the PC.

Anyways, like I said, I uninstalled and all is well. I think that this should serve as a warning to win7 64-bit users- 2010 McAfee is incompatible. There are some exceptions, like my Dad's Pc which cleared up after a chkdsk, but it will cause others to malfunction.