ANSWERS: 2
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There could be lots of reasons for this; spyware, virus, full hard drive, fragmented hard drive, etc. If you have anti-virus and anti-spyware software installed with updated signatures, then you should be okay in that area. As far as being fragmented, you can run the defragmentation utility that comes with the operating system (Windows). If the fragmentation is severe, it may be necessary to run the defragmentation utility multiple times. If the hard drive is full, you'll need to save off files to some other place and then run the defragmentation utility to re-organize the hard drive.
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Another thing to look at is the Device Manager and see if the hard drive has reverted to the slow PIO mode instead of the faster DMA transfer mode. If you have valuable files on this hard drive you should take steps to back them up (copy them to some other storage device) or eventually you WILL lose them. Any storage device can fail without warning. If you don't keep at least two copies on two separate media, then the data isn't important to you.
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