The issue at hand pertains to a slowing down in the performance of a user’s machine. In addition to this, there is a warning message about a defect on the hard disk. There are a number of likely causes for the reduction in machine performance which include: the hard disk is badly fragmented or the storage space is running low. In addition to this, the warning message indicates that the hard disk may contain system errors or even bad sectors which are responsible for the degraded performance. If not dealt with, these defects may result in a complete crash of the hard disk.
Since it is evident that the hard disk has some defects, it is necessary to run some maintenance procedure to deal with the issue. The Check Disk (Chkdsk) utility available in Windows XP enables one to monitor the health of the hard disk. The chkdsk helps to verify the integrity of the file system by examining the hard drive for file system errors and for physical defects. Since a thorough check disk utility is to be run, the options “automatically fix-system errors” and “scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” will be checked. By doing this, the scan will be thorough and lengthy which will ensure that errors are fixed.
Fragmentation of data may also cause the computer to be slow and hence exhibit reduced performance. Severe fragmentation may result in a computer crash. It is therefore necessary to run Defragmentation on the hard disk. Badly fragmented hard disks can affect the performance of the computer and one uses the disk defragmenter utility to reorganize the files on disk. By running this utility, the hard drive will be analyzed and a map of the data will be given. From this an alert is issued of whether the disk needs to be defragmented. One defragmentation takes place a performance boost will be noticeable.
The degradation in system performance may be the result of an accumulation of unnecessary files. To deal with this, one can run the Disk Cleanup utility. This utility assists to deal with temporary files that Windows may have collected over time. This utility will analyze the disk and display actions that can be undertaken to recover disk space. From this utility, programs that are not used can be uninstalled or old system restore points deleted. This will result in space being freed up and hence improve system performance.