Dell™ PC Restore by Symantec

If it is possible that the hard drive is the problem, than why did it get better when I did the F-11? If I do the F-12 how will that diagnose the problem? The question about the F-11 harming the computer, ether the software or the hardware is there any basis to that argument ?  

Repeated use of DSR utility won’t damage the computer

But the hassle of having to download & reinstall all the MS updates & reinstall anything else added since the “box open” date would put most people off the repeated use of DSR.

Norton doesn’t have a good feedback, but check CPU & memory usage in Task Manager to see if there is any particular application (.exe) soaking up CPU &/or Memory

Make sure you are NOT running any more than ONE anti-virus application on your computer

It won't harm the hardware, but it could esily be a failing hard drive that's causing the slowdowns.  Run the extended hard drive diagnostics (F12 at boot) before attempting a restore.

As Husky0894 stated, the slow down may be caused by a failing hard drive.  There are other possible causes, but most of them don't return to bother you for a while once you have fixed them.  Read and write to the platters of the drive is not a digital process, but analog.  A failing drive returns a progressively weaker signal to the magnetic heads, and at some point becomes so weak that the bits read from the drive are incorrect.  When you restore the computer, whether by the CTRL_F11 process or by manually re-installing your software, you temporarily correct the problem by re-writing the data to the drive.  Since the CTRL_F11 is an image, all the data is re-written to the same sectors of the drive that it was originally written to.  If some of the sectors are losing their ability to be magnetized and retain that magnetizm, the drive will begin to return bad data to the heads after some time has passed.  The drive electronics recognizes this type of problem and tries to make up for it by attempting to read the data more than one time.  This will cause things to slow down because the drive must try many times to read a given sector or set of sectors.

The diagnostics that were recommended by restarting the computer and pressing F12 at the Dell screen test the various parts of the computer, including the ability of the drive to read and write data.  It is a non-destructive test (it won't erase your data) and checks out the built-in test report of the drive as well as how many times the sectors must be read in order to get accurate data.  If anything exceeds certain limits, you will get a report on your screen that indicates whether the drive is bad or is still working properly.

You cannot harm your computer by using CTRL_F11 to restore the image to the hard drive.  This process will, however, overwrite any data you may have stored on the hard drive.  That is why the restore menu cautions you to store your data on an external storage device.

I don't know where you heard that performing a restore on a regular basis is not good for the computer, but you're right to disagree!

It's no more harmful than reformatting the hard drive, and doing a 'clean' install... which many of us have done dozens - if not hundreds of times (on the same hard drive) for years, without problems.

There are many different reasons why a computer would start to slow down after a few months.

Disk defragmentation, program installation/uninstallations, junk files,, a virus or spyware, registry problems, etc etc.

Other than performing regular virus and spyware checks, I'd suggest defrgmenting the hard drive, and running a program such as CCleaner (which I use it myself) once or twice a week, to check for registry problems, and get rid of junk files :emotion-55:

You could also uninstall Norton AntiVirus, and use a different program for a while (there are plenty of free programs available), to see if that makes any difference?