HELP is my hard drive dying?

Ya you are probably right. But how do I remove the hard drive? since I can clear it out, hate that personal stuff is on it.

 

Glad you were able to save your files. If you get in the habit of maintenance once a week it will only take a short time and save much anxiety the next time equipement breaks.

Backup Data - found a free utility called Allway Sync that works well. I back up to an external drive.
Update O/S
Clean out junk files
Security Suite like Trend Micro or Zone Alarm 9Antispyware-Antivirus-Firewall)
Diskeeper to defrag - important for performance and Diskeeper works better than the built in Windows defrag
Do the steps in this order as well...
Take care.

the last two can be scheduled to run on whatever cycle you choose. Some backups can be done that way. I prefer to do mine and see exactly what is happening.

 

I think I can do this easy! It opens sideways and is easy to access. I so did the hammer thing last time LOL I thought you would think I was nutts so I didn't ask, but you read my mind!

 

Thanks, I am pretty good about running Trend and Webroot all the time, but defrag I don't seem to remember. How often should I defrag?

 

Defrag

I guess how often you defrag would be based on how much you use your computer. I use mine quite a bit.

I just bought the 2008 version of Diskeeper and there is an automatic feature that keeps all drives dragged.

Before I bought this version I had version 9 and used the set it and forget it feature that would defrag each drive every night.

 

absolutely!