HDD issues

[Sportsman]

My daughter has an old Dell workstation with Win 7 64bit that is normally very fast, but every now and then goes into super slow mode when everything almost stops. This can be for a minute or two or an hour. She has been told that it is a HDD issue as the HDD gets very noisy when this happens.

She is considering getting a SSD to see if this improves things.

She has a 500gb HDD

The SSD would be 250gb

Rather than attempting to clone the disc would she be better off with a clean install of Win 7 from the DVD and then reinstalling all the other programs one at a time?

Are there software programs that will allow her to clone or copy one program at a time?

[chesters1]

Trouble is its the associations that need copying ,the links within windows that go to the program when you start it .

I wish there was a bit of software that would trundle through your hard drive and re associate all the exe files to the windows desktop or star menu .you could just grab the program files folders and insert them back in making life far easier

 

Before you take out the drive run moz backup if she uses firefox or thunderbird it will save your mail and cookies and bookmarks and run settings transfer so your files are kept then rerun it when you have the new disk installed and windows running

 

Modern hard drives dont last long and your machine taking ages to do things is showing the disk is having trouble working ,the hard drive light will hardly go out and your finger nails will be growing faster than waiting for a photo to open!

Edited May 7, 2014 by chesters1

[Andy_1984]

I would have a look at the task manager to make sure its not a program doing it. You will see memory and processor useage.

[kirisute]

there is clone software available that will happily clone to an SSD for you and allow you to pick and choose what software etc you transfer in the process:

http://www.paragon-software.com/technologies/components/migrate-OS-to-SSD/

I use this one which has been superb.

 

Noisy HDD units don't however always mean the drive is about to go defunct! as Andy has stated its worth checking task manager to see what cpu usage and memory usage etc is being hit during the slowdown.

it could be linked to background updates, anti virus updates and various other things inc malware

 

however to be fair a noisy hdd isn't going to be a safe bet in the long run so it might be wise to update sooner rather than awaiting the inevitable.

the primary issue you will probably find wont be the software installed taking up huge amount of space..but the user files,music and photos.

things like office and photoshop etc only take up 2 or 3 gig when installed. I think office 2013 is only about 1.5 gig ish

if she can migrate older photos and downloads and suchlike to an external source then she will be better placed to transfer to a smaller SSD.

[Sportsman]

That all makes sense

Thanks