My Acer Tm4404 suddenly stuttering and slugish

I have an Acer Travelmate 4404wlmi: AMD Turion 64 - 1.8 ghz, 1 gig ramn, 120 hd, ati radeon x700.

While watching a movie file, the audio and video suddenly began to slow down and stutter. The whole machine, including the mouse, began to lag. Boot time and shutdown time also became considerably slow.

I ran an antivirus and spyware check and nothing turned up. I degragmented and nothing turned up. When I ran a disk check, it reached the 4th stage and the computer shutdown spontaneously. I tried to repeat the disk check and the shutdown occured again. This has never happened and doesn't persist when I run windows. It only shutdowns spontaneously during disk check.

I'm considering the thermo fan. It must be clogged with debris. There aren't any guides on how to open my laptop despite thoroush searches over the net. You can already guess what Acer support will say.

Any suggestions.

 

I would make sure to back up all my important files before anything, if you haven't done so in a while. Not too sure how the fan can get so clogged to affect your drive's performance like that.. did you leave it off for a few months or something? If you're out of ideas I would try reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling your OS.

If worst comes to worst, it could be that you maybe bumped your laptop somewhere and cause a head crash in your hard drive. This would mean that your hard drive is scratched on some part and you would have to replace it.

 

i would consider using a utility such as the hitachi drive fitness test on your unit to test the drive thoroughly. its available on the the hitachi site.

i've seen bad sectors on hard drives spontaneously cause a unit to shut down without warning before. And the distinct lack of performance from the unit would also suggest that you have hard disk issues.