Laptop is very slow and takes forever to load - possible bad HDD?

[Zealex]

Hey,

I have about a 5 year old Samsung Series 7. I think its model is 700Z3A. It has a i7-2675QM CPU @ 2.20gh w/ 4 cores and 8 logical processors, 8gbs of RAM, AMD Radeon HD 7400M Series w/ 512 mb of ram. The screen is ~17 inches with a resolution with 1600x900.


Recently there have been many issues with a corrupt windows drive and super slow load times and general freezing. Out of the wild, Windows 10 failed to load the OS and I got these 0x0000#### boot error codes where it asked if I wanted to reinstall windows....I had to use a live cd of linux to save my files and then I reinstalled windows 10 since the recovery solutions I tried all failed. When I first reinstalled windows, my laptop was working well but a few weeks later it began getting really slow and now it doesn't even boot under an hour. The Samsung screens loads and hangs on a full progress bar(which it never used to do). When it boots the OS, it stays on the Windows 10 icon with the loading circle FOREVER(more than an hour). The other day the HDD began scanning randomly because of clusters(IIRC). I am assuming the laptop HDD is failing and needs a replacement ASAP. This is just my guess, I haven't played with hardware in some time.

I figured maybe I could boot with Ubuntu live CD and begin some diagnosis. What tools could I use to check the HDD, the RAM and the computer as a whole? I want to ensure it's the HDD, since I'm looking to get a SSD as both a repair and upgrade. But if there's issues with the CPU, Motherboard, Ram...perhaps I might have to consider a total unit replacement. But if it's just the HDD(which I hope), I can get a SSD. I don't think my laptop is that dated, so I figured repairing my unit wouldn't be a bad idea.

Been thinking of this SSD if my HDD is the culprit:
https/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=20-250-079


Any thoughts or ideas? Thank you for your time, and I appreciate all responses.

 

[kookie3010]

check your disk with crystaldiskinfo.if its yellow or red try removing the hdd and plug it back in again.then run crystaldiskinfo and see if there are any changes.i had this slowdown issue before with my old m15x r2 and cyrstaldiskinfo shows that my hdd life is in the yellow.i reseat the drive and it suddenly turns green and the slowdown is no more.use it for another 6 months before i ditch it for an ssd.