redfish Posted November 21, 2014 Share Posted November 21, 2014 Recently, the hard disk on my Toshiba laptop crashed and I had to bring it in, return it, and replace it. It was still under the 90 day warranty, so I was able to do that pretty easily. The first sign of problems happened when I installed the first release of the Windows 10 Technical Preview. During the install, some problem happened, and when the computer rebooted, there was a disk problem, which I figured was just corrupted data. So I reformatted the drive and did a clean install. The computer then worked perfectly until recently. During the last Win 10 update, I noticed that some things were going pretty slowly. I read some forum messages, and this sounded like a common problem, so I didn't worry about it. Over time, things became slower and slower, and it took forever for my web browsers to load up pages. Eventually, I realized the slowdown was connected to disk access. So, one day I left early in the morning to go somewhere, and returned home my laptop was in sleep, and I was unable to wake it. Because there was nothing else I could do, I shut it off. When I turned it back on, there was another disk problem. This time, it was unrepairable. I tried reformatting the drive and using repair tools but nothing worked. So, my question is, should I worry about installing Windows 10 on my replacement laptop, or should I assume this was a problem with the individual laptop I had before? Thanks, guys, for your help ahead of time. that dude 702 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zhangm Supervisor Posted November 21, 2014 Supervisor Share Posted November 21, 2014 The drive issue is almost certainly unrelated to Windows 10. Shoving an OS' worth of ones and zeroes onto it, followed by indexing and program installations probably pushed a dying drive over the edge. It is unlikely that you'll see a repeat with new hardware. However, if the possibility of downtime, crashes, data loss, and things just not working quite right doesn't seem very appealing to you, you should really consider Windows 7 or Windows 8. redfish 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
redfish Posted November 21, 2014 Author Share Posted November 21, 2014 However, if the possibility of downtime, crashes, data loss, and things just not working quite right doesn't seem very appealing to you, you should really consider Windows 7 or Windows 8. I've used alphas and betas before, I put up with them... I just don't want them killing my computer. The computer was new, and W10 was installed within a week of purchase, which is when I experienced the first disk problem.. and that's the only reason why I was asking. I figured that the last build of W10 did slow down disk access, and that made it more likely for the disk problem to re-appear and for things to go wrong. The replacement computer is the exact same model. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sc302 Veteran Posted November 21, 2014 Veteran Share Posted November 21, 2014 You are putting a technical preview (pre beta...almost alpha) OS on a computer that you are using daily and are asking about usability issues. Does anyone else see a problem here? Leave the os you have on your laptop alone or have some test hardware that you dont mind blowing up every so often. Physical hardware damage is unlikely to be a cause of the OS, slowness would be. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
redfish Posted November 21, 2014 Author Share Posted November 21, 2014 You are putting a technical preview (pre beta...almost alpha) OS on a computer that you are using daily and are asking about usability issues. Does anyone else see a problem here? Leave the os you have on your laptop alone or have some test hardware that you dont mind blowing up every so often. Physical hardware damage is unlikely to be a cause of the OS, slowness would be. No, I'm not asking about usability issues, just to be clear. Just the physical issues. I figured it was most likely not a software-related problem. But I was thinking the OS possibly put stress on the drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zhangm Supervisor Posted November 21, 2014 Supervisor Share Posted November 21, 2014 No, I'm not asking about usability issues, just to be clear. Just the physical issues. I figured it was most likely not a software-related problem. But I was thinking the OS possibly put stress on the drive. The deal with hard drives (both mechanical spinners and solid state ones) is that the failure vs time relationship isn't linear. You get some subset of duds that fail fairly quickly after being put into use. Then the rate of failure drops, but the total number of failures increases as time goes on. Read any set of reviews for mechanical drives on Newegg or another electronics vendor. If you see a star histogram for drive reviews, usually you'll get mostly 4 and 5 stars, very few 2 and 3 stars, and then quite a few more one stars from folks who had theirs fail almost immediately on firing them up. You probably ended up with one of those. redfish 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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