Notebooks Laptop extremely slow after windows install

Need help with this one. I have a Sony Vaio VPCEB4L1E that Im trying to fix running windows 7. The computer is extremely unresponsive and unusually slow even with a fresh install of windows.

It previously wouldn't boot past the welcome screen. I tried startup repair but this did not work so I formatted and reinstalled Win7, but the computer is now incredibly slow. It took over 6 hours to install windows and trying to open or install programs is unusually slow. It can take over 15 minutes to display the components info when speccy is opened.

I'm thinking it could be the harddrive failing? But windows error checking doesn't detect any faults and speccy reads the drive as 'good'.

Any help appreciated?

Thanks

 

If possible, install crystaldiskinfo and check the hard drive health with that. Alternatively, use the HD manufacturer software to run diagnostics on the drive.

 

Thanks for that I should have ran crystaldisk. It says health status 'caution' with 149 reallocated sectors. I assume it's this which is likely causing the problem and it's best to replace then

 

Sounds like the hard drive is stuffed, I had a drive with 2-3 reallocated sectors and a few pending sectors, only used as storage, but it took ages to load stuff on it, and would lock up explorer if you went near anything stored on the dodgy sectors.

 

I swear by crystaldiskinfo. Anything that shows up as yellow or caution gets replaced, no questions. Windows disk diagnostics is utter crap. WD isn't bad, but for a quick look, crystaldiskinfo does the job nicely.

 

I've also just ran WD data lifeguard diagnostic and it fails a quick test very quickly. Says it failed read test element.

Any recommendations for a good but cheap 2.5 drive?

 

WD Caviar Blue. Or if you want lightning, an SSD.

 

If if the HD is on the way out, it's also working checking the CPU + GPU temperatures, CPU frequency and fan speeds.

It could be thermal throttling that is knocking the CPU down to rock bottom.

 

I've tested it with another drive tonight and it works perfectly so it's definitely the drive thats screwed!

It crossed my mind that the cpu could be being throttled but the temps in speccy were around 40 degrees in my warm room so thought that ruled that out. I assume that's reliable, what's the definitive test for cpu throttling?

And thanks for everyone's help