Right then, so, I was given the task of speeding up the girlfriend's laptop, which just happens to be a Lenovo G535 with a 1Tb hard drive and preloaded with Windows 8. It had got to the point it was so sluggish it was barely usable.
First port of call was to do a full on system recovery. That failed miserably when I restarted it after the recovery and it didn't boot up at all.
Second port of call was to do a complete re-installation of Windows onto the computer from a disc. And as I needed a Windows 7 disc for my laptop, she had always prefer Windows 7 to Windows 8 and disc from eBay were just as much without a new product key as they were with, I decided to go for that option. Upon receiving the disc through the post, I thought I'd give it a go that night. Big mistake, once it had collected all the preliminary information, it took over an hour to expand just 15% of the installation files. I eventually gave up until tonight. Remember, I had completely formatted the hard drive, I'd even gone to the lengths of wiping the recovery partition and consolidating all the hard drive's partitions.
The third and final port of call. Suspecting that it was possibly a fault with the hard drive, I decided to swap out the laptop's original hard drive with a 250Gb laptop hard drive I had laying around from a previous laptop of mine. (I know what you're thinking, swapping a 1Tb hard drive for one quarter of the size is madness, but remember, at this point, it was just a theory). After performing the transplant, I set to installing Windows 7 again, low and behold, Windows installed without so much of a hiccup, and in much under an hour. In fact, I'm sat here now, typing this blog from the laptop and there is no lag or sluggishness to be seen.
Which kind of proves my theory of a faulty hard drive, or does it? Well while the laptop seems to be working fine at the moment, I'm going to keep booting it up and using it for the next week, before returning it to my girlfriend to make sure of no lag or sluggishness. Not only that, but the laptop's original hard drive, is sat on the side looking all sorry for itself, so tomorrow, I'll put it into my old laptop and see if the laptop's original OS will install on it without any issues, it's Windows XP (most people's favourite version of Windows) what could possibly go wrong? Well, if the hard drive is fried, then it just won't install, or if it does, it'll take a lifetime to install.
Should be fun, watch this space.
