Hello, I have been battling with hardware support and warranty service to fix my computer, computer has been veerrrry slow, HP pentium3, 550mhz, 20GB hd, 128MB Ram, it is running much, much slower than my old 486 (which I still use). Defrag takes up to 10 hours, screensaver takes 60+ seconds to stop and display desktop, etc. I did everything I could to try to fix it because they kept telling me it was software, as a last resort I reformatted and restored from the disc that came with the computer, reformat took 8+ hours! After restore it was still slow, so I called support back and told them, they thought I did something wrong so they had me run scandisk through DOS, the screen was covered with "red B's", it took 5 hours to get to the point where it was 19% complete and scandisk found 84 bad clusters (new), so they had me reformat again through DOS and a start up disk, this time reformat took 10+ hours! They have decided that I need a new hard drive (duh) but my question is what about the processor? Would just the hard drive make it that slow? Thanks for your input!! Warranty is up in Dec. and I want to make sure all is covered!! Lori

At a guess i would say your processer is fine.It must have been crashing frequently to get that many bad sectors.Probably caused by software errors at first then after the damage has been done it would continue to crash when it tried to read the drive at the spots where the bad sectors where.Problem with bad sectors is they tend to breed once you have a few they will just carry on forming.Have you tried a zero fill utility to format it.

Yeah it sounds like your hard drive is having real problems. If you want to give it one last shot before you return it you could try a low-level format(if there's a utility for your drive) and that might get rid of bad clusters. But if you can get the drive replaced for free then to heck with it.

Lori, you definitely have a BAD hard disk! I got three 30 gig system pulls once, and one was bad. Showed same symptoms yours does. They do fail over time. MTBF rating is MEAN Time Before Failure (averaging method). Solution is to get yourself a new hardisk, pull old one and junk it, install new one, partition and format it, and install windows and all your apps. You will be all set. Charles

Because bad sectors (Bs) are sometimes a software mistake it is common sense to download WIPE.exe from the IBM site and wipe the drive before you give up on it. If SCANDISK finds them again after the WIPE, they really are bad sectors, but I have seldom had a large number of bad sectors that stayed.

Thank you very much for all your input!! Lori

just had same thing happen to me on my 20gb tried low level format seemed to be allright but then the errors just started happining again lockups bad sectors sometimes no hard disk found (i think the electronics must have went as the disk seemed allright when i low level formated it) so i bought a new 80gb never been better so i would give low level format a try but i think you might need a new hd