EPT
Quick (or rather long; scroll to the bottom paragraph to see the question itself) question.
I have a friend whose laptop (Toshiba Satellite A215-S4807 running Vista Home Premium, 2gb RAM, 2.4 GHz Dual Core) has been slowing down lately. I'm no wizard but I understand a few things about computers, so I took a look at it and ran the usual 4 things I do with any comp maintenance: defrag, virus scan, scan disk, ccleaner and it sped it up. I was a little concerned when I ran the scandisk because she had ~8 bad clusters which had nicked parts of her system32 folder but nothing else really critical (heh).
Now, she had told me she was having serious battery problems, and when she had it portable it would power off from battery issues commonly. I know that power failures can cause problems with the hdd, so I figured that she had been particularly unlucky and it was nothing serious.
I did this around december of last year, and by july this year it was worse. I took it back and ran all the stuff again, and this time scandisk found 16 bad clusters. Now, I know she hasn't had the power issues and she's been taking better care of it.
I talked to a computer guy I know, and he said that a hdd generating bad clusters that fast (8 clusters in 2 years, 16 in 3 months) is probably dying. Now, since everybody brings their problems to TL for the final word, does this sound right? Is a hdd that generates 16 bad clusters in 3 months going bad? Would the data still be accessible as a slave drive or in an external shell?
Any insight from anybody who knows about computers would be helpful. Thanks guys.
