sometimes i try to open a file and my hard drive light stays on and I can hear it trying to access the file but it just gets stuck. most of the time this results in having to reboot. do I need a new hard drive?
Like everybody said, that's a sign of a hard drive going bad. You should backup all your files to a CD or another driver. Once you have a good backup, do a scandisk/chkdsk to see if you can repair the bad sector or any inconsistencies. If you are able to repair the bad sector, do a disk cleanup and defrag.