My Aspire 3100 went bad

My aspire AS3102WLMI was going fine for a few months now then suddenly today I got a BSOD when it was waking up from a hibernate. Restarted before I could see what the error was. I shut it off and came back later to find out it was taking a reaaaaally longtime to boot up. In fact the windows XP animation with the little blue squares that scroll across the screen was lagging. A few minutes in and I was at the desktop, this took another 4 min to load. Okay I thought maybe it was just taking a while to boot. Went back, got a drink loaded all the programs. Then when I tried to play an audio file or access any file on my comp it slowed down, audio was choppy. Streamed audio and video off websites too. Thinking the hard drive was going bad I got the seagate diagnostics tool for the hard drive. The first time I ran the Self diagnostics test the comp gave me another BSOD and rebooted suddenly. The second time it ran and gave the hard drive a pass on all tests.

Any idea what else I should do? My laptop is still under warranty anyone have any experience with acer on sending it back to them for repair?

 

Maybe run memory checker on it do you recall what bluescreen said?

do you have any dmp files in

c:\windows\minidumps?


does do often if so you can change some seting and get debug files so find out what happening with it

 

could be a ram issue however a hard drive problem seems more likely as you state that the unit takes a very long time to load up anything. Also choppy audio is another symptom of a bad hard drive.
I would consider using a hard drive hardware testing utility such as the ibm disk checker (or hitatchi as they are now known) and use that to fully test the function of your drive.

You could also check the windows event veiwer and look in the system section and look for errors related to hard drive. Its possible that there has been a drive corruption in windows and it is causing the unit to operate in PIO mode so a simple disk to disk recovery may be all thats needed.

 

Yeah just got a big "FAILURE FIXED DISK 0" at the POST screen. Afterwards it booted up normally again. Okay. My laptop is still under Acers warranty.. Any advice on how the process works and all with them? Also I tested both sticks of ram in my laptop and both gave errors under memtest86.

Pretty sure its the drive now though. Smart seems to have kicked in
AAaaand its also in PIO mode right now.

 

Got it out of PIO mode and all the POST disk error messages stopped, lag stopped. The works. That's kind of strange, but for now it works. Going to run some scans of HD to make sure it won't die on me.