Help for friends

[Chronus]

Hey I was wondering if you guys would mind me posting questions that my friends have here. My friends are from another forum community. I've told them that they can come here and post about the problems there having, but I don’t know if they will or not. Anyway until they diced to come here on there own, here’s their questions.

Due to my hard drive crashing recently and all, I had to get a new hard drive. Fortunately, my computer is working pretty well now for the most part. I'm just waiting on my files and programs, which I can hopefully recover.

Anyway, this has made me wonder what causes hard drives to crash exactly. I've gotten different opinions about this issue. Some people think it's because of stuff downloaded from the Internet. However, I don't really know. (I'm not really tech-savvy on all of this.) So my first question is obviously about cause(s).

The second question I have is the following: How do I avoid my hard drive from crashing again in the future? Should I do a yearly subscription renewal of my antivirus software? Some people have said that I should while others say that it's pointless. So what do you think?

I can't run scandisk. When it gets to the part about checking how much space I can free by compressing all my files, it freezes up. I thought I just had a lot of files, and left it on overnight. Still didn't move onto the next step. What should I do?

Thanks for the help, let me know if this is not appropriate.

 

[smore9648]

Three things are guaranteed in life.

1. Death:dead:

2. Taxes:hotouch:

3. Hard Drive failure


Hard drives will die eventually but you can make the most of its time by taking care of it.

Always run defrag on a regular basis.

Run Anti Virus, Firewall and spyware/adware/malware type programs. (This only prevents your drive from having being manipulated/erased/infected)

Hard drives has moving parts aka Platters,Motors, Heads. The heads are the mechanisms that seek and access all your info, which are stored on the platters.

The heads sometimes stick or lock up causing the drive to malfunction.

The motor stops spinning eventually

 

[Liquidlen]

You can also check to see if your new HDD supports Smartdrive. The application checks your Hdd and tells it's posible lifespan and can warn you if trouble is near. It may not be 100% foolproof, but it is better than nothing.
More importantly, maintain a good Backup procedure!!!

 

[smore9648]

You can also save it by not loading Norton and IE:unch: