"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.
