Member Panel

I have a hard drive that's possibly ready to go...

It slows my pc down, takes a while to get into disk drives, makes screeching,clicking and other noises and i think some of my files were missing.

Should I get it replaced or should I just buy a new pc? (The pc itself is pretty out of date with 20 something ram and only 80GB).

i did silly things to the pc also O_O. I used to turn it off not properly and i moved the pc a few times due to decorating.
and had a few harmless viruses over the years...
Could that have affected it's lifespan?

My pc is 1-2 years old...also.

Hello Marge21 welcome to PCHF.

Screeching and such certainly isn't good and would suggest that your hard drive is about to give up if you are certain it is the source of the noise.

It's hard to give you advice on the computer though without more information to go on as to what you have in the way of hardware and what your requirements are.

For example if you aren't a gamer and the primary purpose of your machine is to surf and email then you wouldn't need a power house machine whereas if you were constantly doing video editing and gaming you naturally would.

If you could post the make and model of the machine you have it would help us to make a better assessment.

Based solely on the fact that you say the machine is only one to two years old it might well be possible to upgrade it whereas if that's a typo and you mean 12yrs old then I'd say get a new machine.

Viruses and malware certainly do take their toll on a computers performance but that can be fixed and likely has nothing to do with the impending hard drive failure.

It's 2 year old pc. I think It's custom made...

Processor: AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 2800+, MMX, 3DNow, ~1.6GHz
Memory: 222MB RAM
Page File: 312MB used, 233MB available


I do video editing and I do play video games but not many because the look crappy, don't work or are uber slow.

Hmmmmm............those are pretty skimpy specifications for a two year old machine.

Most definitely I'd suggest looking at getting something newer particularly since you do want to game and work with videos.

Because the technology changes so fast all the time I'd be inclined to get into a Quad Core machine with a minimum of 2GB RAM (4GB even better unless the operating system will be XP) so that it will last you for a few years before again becoming a dinosaur.

If you are considering building your own you might start a thread asking for recommendations and others will chime in with their thoughts.