Slow Hard Drive

Subscriber Jack Carmena wrote me about some problems with Trend Micro:

Trend-Micro is taking 5-7 hours to run doing a virus check.
Is that indicative of a problem I ought to be concerned about?

I wrote back to ask if he was seeing anything else that might indicate slow hard drive access? Windows will try to reread and reread and reread when it has trouble getting data from the hard drive.

He’d been running Trend Micro PC-cillin for a long time, so I wondered if this was the same version or a new update…

This is the same version I have been running for 6 months or more except for the periodic auto update.
I am seeing some slowness in reaction time when I open a program, etc.

At this point, I don’t know if he has a configuration issue, if he has shifted from a "smart scan" to scanning all files, if his hard drive has files so fragmented that fragmentation is causing the slow access, or if he has a hard drive that’s starting to go bad.

I suggested three steps, with the last one probably running overnight:

1. First, we need to make sure that the hard drive is not failing.
1. Download, install and run HDTUNE ( http://www.hdtune.com/ , freeware).
2. Check the Health tab and make sure it all shows OK in he Status column.
2. Run a file system check (used to be called scandisk).
1. Start > My Computer, right click on C:
2. Select Properties.
3. Clck on the Tools tab.
4. In the Error-checking box, click on the "Check now" button.
5. Click the checkbox “Automatically fix file system errors” (If you knew you had a hard drive failure, you might not want to do that).
3. Defragment the hard drive.
1. Next box down, click the Defragment Now button.
2. Select the partition you want to check (you might have only one big C: partition).
3. Click Analyse, which will take maybe 1-10 minutes.
4. Then, click Defragment.
5. This will probably run several hours.
6. Reboot.

At this point, if the problem was hard drive fragmentation, it’s probably been solved.