Slow read & write from Hard drive

[tsume]

I'm not sure if the title is clear but let me explain my issue
It seems Windows 7 is slow on reading & writing data from hard drive, which in turn seems to have slowed the perfomance of my laptop
When listening to music the sound will drop at random points as the rest of the song is being loaded into memory. Videos as well, but when I play videos from my external there is no issue.

What could be the possible cause/solution.
I have 4GB of RAM & it never seems to be fully utilized when these issues occur. My virtual memory is also set at 4GB.
The hard drive light also goes off at random points though I have no application running.

 

[howardb]

I would check the Event Viewer to start with and see what is happening when the problem occurs (Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer).
How much space is available on your HDD?

 

[NomNom]

Screenshot of your Task Manager, more specifically the Processes tab could be helpful.

The hard drive light also goes off at random points though I have no application running.

I'm pretty sure that's normal.

 

[supersunbird]

I might be doing that search indexing thing. I was struggling over the weekend playing the media files from my one drive,, they open slow and then get stuck a lot, other drive worked perfectly. Next morning it worked correctly again (without a restart).

 

[tsume]

Screenshot of your Task Manager, more specifically the Processes tab could be helpful.



I'm pretty sure that's normal.

Will screenshot ASAP.
I thought it was also normal until I compared my two laptops and one just kept on flashing even when I had no torrents running

 

[tsume]

I would check the Event Viewer to start with and see what is happening when the problem occurs (Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer).
How much space is available on your HDD?

500GB hard drive with 150GB free

 

[tsume]

Here are the screenshots:
http://i.imgur.com/urwUoor.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/cuNcX1q.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/uM7oIwD.jpg

 

[tsume]

I'm actually gonna restore the system to a previous point. I'm thinking it was Windows update which messed up my system

Edit: this option seems to be out. I only have 2 restore points and both of them are fairly recent
Edit2: *facepalm* The reason why I only have recent restore points is because I thought disk space was an issue so I cleaned up my hard drive of system properties such as restore points

 

[nivek]

maybe run seatools on the drive

 

[nivek]

try killing that ff_protection task and seeing if it makes a difference

 

[tsume]

I simply reached boiling & decided to restore my laptop to it's factory setting. Luckily I keep all my files backed up on external hard drive so the biggest task will just be reinstalling all my old software

 

[HavocXphere]

Make a backup. Music dropping +slow hdd is a really bad sign.

 

[RyanPCMR]

Try to use software like auslogics disk defrag to defrag your hard disk. There might be some amount of fragmentation on your hard disk. Also make sure to scan for bad sectors on the hard disk. Then reduce the number of processes running in the background and using Revo Uninstaller look at reducing number of programs launched during windows startup; I prefer to put some software on a delayed start schedule during windows startup.

Computer troubleshooting is not an exact science and you have to preferably make a CD or DVD containing troubleshooting software that can be used when you experience issues, like Hiren's BootCD...