worth trying to save it?

[thingemajib]

the family laptop has recently been running very sluggish (~18 month old dell studio 1737). Im running the dell diagnostics at the mo, and it has found roughly 50 bad blocks (and its only 52% through the test at the mo) on the HDD. As i understand it, i might be able to get around this by remapping and a low level format, but will the drive just keep failing and making more bad blocks?

basically what im trying to say is the parents are VERY budget concious. The lappie is out of warranty. Should i just cut the losses and tell them to get a new HDD or do you think i have a shot with this whole remapping/formatting malarky?

 

[tom_e]

for the price of a new hdd I'd just go with that for peice of mind more than anything else, loosing data or random crashes as the current one keeps failing would drive me mad

 

[inogen]

I've had problems with XP and win2000 when the OS partition became too full causing bad blocks etc.

The drives always worked fine when kept 10-15% free.

I always reformatted them to fix them.

Don't have the problem with Win7 though.

 

[thingemajib]

well i spoke to dell. comparing my thoughts with their thoughts and your responses it sounds like a new hard drive is the best way to go. ordered a 320gig scorpio blue from ocuk. The equivilent replacement from dell would have cost me £140 :O How can they honestly justify a price like that when i can get the same thing with a three year warranty for £35?

 

[DragonQ]

Because they're Dell. :/