HDD Light Solid And Computer Slow

So for the last 2 or 3 weeks one of my PCs is having an issue where the HDD light will remain solid and the computer becomes incredibly slow. I only use the computer for FFXI, and never get on the internet with it.

It did have low space, but I cleaned up about 60% of the HD and that did fix the problem originally (this was about a week ago), but it just began again this morning after I unplugged everything and cleaned the dust out of the inside.

When it first boots up it seems to be just fine, but the moment I try to do anything the HDD light becomes solid and that's when it slows down. I can't even try to open the desktop icon tray without this happening.

If anyone can offer any insight, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Assuming it's a magnetic drive, is it fragmented?


It very well may be an array of things from failing disc, to corrupt files to a virus, to simple fragmentation.


Windows 7 and up should be defragging on it's own unless it was disabled (not sure about vista, never used it much). Honestly if you are still using a computer with a magnetic drive and all you use it for is XI take a few hours and install a ssd and reinstall everything, if nothing for the better boot times it's worth it. Could potentially get away with a 128gb drive but as 256 are cheap now may as well.


Does your computer have a drive diagnostic utility by chance?

Well, just a small update first, but I tried deleting a small file and for some reason that fixed the solid HDD light enough for me to actually log into FFXI, and just sitting on my MH right now it seems fine. Last week I deleted several gigs of stuff and that also fixed the issue, so I'm not sure if that would be telling of anything or not.

As for the type of HDD, I got this PC 5 years ago, and truth be told I'm not an expert on these things, but I definitely didn't go terribly high end on it since I knew it was only for XI.

It's set up to auto-defrag I believe, and when I tried to do it last week it said the drive wasn't defragmented. As for the new drive, I may end up looking into that eventually, but for the time being I'm kind of stuck with what I have right now heh.

For drive diagnostic, if I need to download a 3rd party program for that then I don't have one, but not sure if one would come installed on a PC if you bought it new.

Thank you for the insight on some of this stuff though, it's definitely appreciated.