Old Dell Inspiron 600m Problem

This is the 4th year I've had my Inspiron 600m, and up until last week it had never caused any problems at all.

I was using the computer normally, just doing some Excel work, when suddenly the screen flashed a few times and then went black (it was turned on, but no image). After that, everything takes forever load. XP takes around 10min to fully load, then around 5 more to load the desktop, and opening programs initially takes a long time as well (5-10min for Firefox, but some like Windows Live and uTorrent just take a bit longer than it used to). However, once fully loaded the programs work normally. Navigating through folders is sometimes a pain and takes a while to load SOME folders (I can't do anything else when it's loading, it freezes until it's done), and oddly enough it happens also with any external device connected (like my External Hard Drive).

Also, some files seem to be damaged in the internal HDD. I have been able to transfer most files safely to my External Hard Drive, but every once in a while I will encounter a file that I can't transfer (either it tells me "Cannot read from file or disk" or "Cyclic redundancy check").

I suspect it's the hard drive, but I am not entirely sure, so that's why I am asking if anyone has any knowledge of what could be faulty given the conditions I have described. Any help will be greatly appreciated!

 

In the future please break up your post into paragraphs. It is next to impossible to read.

Those errors are from a hard drive with errors. It is possibly dieing but it might be possible by running a check disk on it to correct those errors.

 

Weird, I thought I did. Fixed though.

I tried doing a check disk but it gets stuck early (I left it for half a day I think). Will try again though.