Laptop issues, really weird

[Coolone]

Okay, so I was trying to help this girl fix her laptop because she said it was going really slow, so I figured that it was probably spyware/fragmented HD/crap and that it just needed to be cleaned up. The machine was actually pretty clean to start off with, so that wasnt the problem. The sound has also be acting really weird, stuttering very badly. I wondered if the HD might be dying off, but chkdsk didnt bring up anything unusual.

Nothing seems to be bogging down the CPU, and the memory isnt being hogged up by anything in particular. Windows is also taking forever to boot up, so I havnt been able to nail down any single process that could be causing this. I have a feeling that this has something to do with the hard drive, since its taking forever for data to be pulled from it.

These are the specs that I know:
HP Laptop
AMD Turion 64 (dont know how fast)
1Gig of RAM
Windows XP (Home or Media Center is my guess)
80GB HD with 60GB free

Any ideas?

 

[lukmeg]

Try and run HDTach and see what you find. Something like this happened to me before and I found that the HD somehow had been set to PIO mode instead of DMA.

 

[Coolone]

Thanks lukmeg, the software showed that the transfer rate of the hard drive was 1MB/sec!, so I told her that the hard drive needs to be replaced. Apparently the maching is only 4 months old, so its still under warranty.