Hard Drive Getting Ready to Die........HELP!!!

[Graybeard]

Eminent brothers,
I'm almost positive the hard drive on our home computer is getting ready to die. It's been super sloooow, gets locked up and makes a grinding noise everytime it needs to do something. Accessing my e-mail, TF and Facebook seems to take all day!!! The only thing I have stored of any worth are my photos, but My Lovely Bride and son Bludworm have documents and other stuff they want to save. It's a Dell so I have the option of wiping the hard drive with the push of a function key and I resorted to doing that once before. But we lost stuff and re-establishing my internet connection/service was a real chore. Any ideas how I should save my photos and get some extra life out of our old machine??

[Gerald]

Go buy an external drive and download your stuff.

[wjzink]

I would buy an external USB hard drive (not a small thumb drive, but a larger capacity one. For example...http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...4&Sku=I21-6380) and copy all your important files right away. Install a new hard drive (not hard to do) and reinstall your programs. If your computer is more than 5-6 years old might just want to buy a new machine.
I've been through this several times over the past 15 years with my PCs. I'm writing this from my MacBook Pro...a great laptop (I've had an assortment of desktops and laptops over the years and this one definitely is my favorite so far.)

[hammock14]

If you think it could die any minute burn your important stuff to disc immediately. Then get an external HD as suggested and do regular backups. As wjzink said, if it is an older box buy new if it is fairly new replace the hard disk. Make sure you are being the right interface when you buy the hard drive. Older drives used an IDE (or EIDE - ribbon cable) and the newer ones are all SATA (a thin cable compared to the old stuff).

[Bend-Lure]

I purchased a 2TB external drive this week for $90 incl shipping. Storage is pretty cheap now. You could likely find a 500GB drive for $50ish.

[BigWillJ]

Ditto what everyone is saying about an external hard drive. Just went thru what you're going thru, EXCEPT, I waited too long to do anything, and our PC went kaput altogether. Took drive out of PC and to a computer store, where they saved everything to an external drive. With our PC and printer otherwise being so old, we bought all new and started over. Having our files moved to the external drive, all of our stuff was salvaged.

Important to note that the problem was never proven to be the hard drive, or perhaps something else, even with a couple of expensive service calls.

Hence the final decision to start over, with files saved.

[ontheflats]