Hard Drive Problems

Hi. Im having alot of trouble with my computer (Dell Dimension 4400 XP Professional). Ive gotten the blue screen several times and it has also crashed. It usually crashes when I try to defragment or scan for viruses. Also when it is left alone for awhile, it goes into Power Save mode, but wont let me exit (so I doubt its actually hibernating. A different forum said I had bad sectors. Would a program like RegCure fix this? Or is it alot more complicated than that?

If it is out of my computer skills, would an external hard drive be able to replace my internal one as the main drive, so these bad sectors (if that is the problem) are no longer a threat. If you need any more details, I'll be happy to give them.

For one an external drive is intended mainly as a storage device even while it can bump the default boot device when added on in the drive list found in the bios setup. As for RegCure that would be a total waste of time there being intended as a retail cleaner/fixer for the system registry.

The power options settings can be set to never instead of seeing the display go into standgy or the hard drive stop after so many minutes. But the thing to pay close attention to is any information seen displayed onscreen during a BSOD(blue screen of death) since that will often point out a problem driver or some other useful information needed for diagnostics.

You could be seeing bad sectors or worn heads on the drive depending age and wear. The information seen in a blue screen, memory dump, and even the event viewer can be the most helpful however.