Noooo mah laptop si dying (HDD issue I think)

[Moe]

I have a Sony Vaio S series, which has been working splendidly up until about two weeks ago when every 30 seconds or so the computer would stutter for a bit. When playing a game, everything would freeze for a sec, then resume at triple speed until I was "caught up".

I played with driver updates, system restore, factory restore, tried both the intel GMA and the radeon graphics card, even booted into safe mode (this occurs when say typing in MS Word as well), and from the looks of it I think that my HDD is to blame. Response times in performance monitor are sometimes up to thousands of milliseconds for some processes and files.

HD Tune indicates a SMART warning for reallocated sector count (14) and 65 sector fails, which is not yet enough to trigger a SMART failure warning on POST.

Does anyone have any other ideas what this could be?

Thanks!

[ShyGuy]

It definitely sounds like an HDD issue, but it could also be the RAM. The type stuttering, and long response times could be indicative of a problem there. Does the stuttering occur only when playing games and/or using programs that auto-save to disk like Word, or is it a constant thing?

[Moe]

Ooops, forgot I made this thread. It doesn't really seem to occur when I'm just looking at the desktop or say streaming music online.

[ShyGuy]

I would say its probably the hard drive as well then. If it was just a RAM issue, I would expect the streaming music to feature this stuttering/fast-forwarding as well.

[Homdax]

1. backup your data externally
2. if you have sony warranty left, get their tech support, give them a chance to replace hdd
3. (if 2 fails) get the serial/brand of the hdd and check for warranty/rma at the manufacturers site, they may want you to run their tool, (like Seatools from Seagate) to check the drive
4. Optional: if you have time and resources, do a wipe of the drive using the branded tool, writing zeroes to it and then a new Windows installation. Will sometimes help, depending on hdd's error condition.

Did you do a chkdsk /f? Bad sectors can be handled by Windows as long as Windows is given a chance to mark them as bad and thus avoiding them for usage by the filesystem.