Question

A user reports that their desktop is running slowly and occasionally freezes. When you approach the machine, you hear a repetitive clicking sound coming from the internal hard drive, and the OS shows several delayed read errors in the event log. What should you do FIRST?

Accepted Answer

Back up the user's data immediately before attempting any further diagnostics

Answer

Run a full disk defragmentation to reorganize the files and improve performance

Answer

Update the drive's firmware to resolve the read errors

Answer

Run CHKDSK with the repair flag to fix the bad sectors