I have a Compaq Presario 1700 (from 2001) it has; 933MHz Pentium III 256mb of Ram 20GB Hard Drive (Hitachi_DK23CA-20) {original hard drive} Windows XP Home This laptop does what I need, which is the most important thing. Lately it has been running extremely slow, and I notice the hard drive is really hot. Speed fan says that it is running at a maximum of 70 degrees Celsius, which I know is extremely high, but I believe it because it feels really hot. It also makes many funny sounds at times. I am thinking that it should be replaced, I have seen an 80GB 2.5 inch Hitachi drive, and it is an IDE drive. I wonder if it is normal for laptop hard drives to run at 70 degrees, and it is fine, or should it be replaced? Thank You for your help, Jesse

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"It also makes many funny sounds at times." All sorts of things can cause slowness, but it should not be doing that - it's probably failing. Check your hard drive with the manufacturer's diagnostics. See the latter part of response 1 in this: http://www.computing.net/windows95/... (thanks to Dan Penny for this link:) Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm... Your HD temp is about 20 degrees C hotter than the max an older hard drive should get to. There are several common reasons a hard drive could get that hot in a laptop. Any of these would show up in your bios Setup current settings as the current cpu or case temps inside the case being higher than normal. - the cpu fan and/or heatsink is clogged with mung, and/or the cpu fan is spinning too slowly because of accumulated bearing wear and the extra friction it causes, and/or there is accumulated mung buildup in the cooling passages inside the case and/or there is mung buildup in the openings that access those passages, and/or something is blocking or too close to those external openings, causing more heat than normal to build up inside the laptop case. - it's being used in a hot environment. - the circuit board on the drive is defective - I've seen many cases where at least one of the chips on a malfunctioning drive gets so hot you can't keep a fingertip on it. Sometimes this happens on it's own, but too much heat inside the case for too long can certainly damage the circuit board on the drive.